Ryu is the central character in Street Fighter, both in the story and in the game mechanics of fireball/dragon punch. In Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo (ST), he’s not especially powerful (no one ranks him as top tier), and yet in the hands of an expert, he’s able to win tournaments. He’s a well-balanced character already.

I asked tournament player John Choi to give me a complete list of Ryu changes that he wanted for SF HD Remix. Choi is, I think, the #1 Ryu player in the US. Choi contemplated this for weeks and finally came up with his complete list:

1) add a fake fireball2) no other changes.

This was not what I expected, but I immediately liked it. Ryu already has the tools he needs to win, so he doesn’t really need much of a change. Choi’s original reasoning for the fake fireball was to give him an answer to Dhalsim’s drills. Dhalsim can drill Ryu on reaction when he sees a fireball, but a fake would trick Dhalsim into committing, then Ryu would recover from the fake and be able to Dragon Punch. That was NOT the reason I actually put the move in the game though.

Why a Fake Fireball?

As soon as I heard Choi's idea, I realized that it solved a problem we were about to have, before we even had it. The problem has to do with how powerful projectiles are in general in Street Fighter.

In ST, projectiles like fireballs are extremely powerful, and that’s part of what makes positioning and spacing so important. Strong projectiles add depth to the game. The problem is that in ST, fireballs are just a little too strong. One of my goals with SF HD Remix is to reduce the number of really bad match ups—matches where one character dominates the other—and that list from ST is full of matches where a projectile character dominates a non-projectile character. The non-fireball characters need a few more ways to deal with fireballs, but it’s a delicate thing. If we have a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is the effectiveness of fireballs in Super Turbo and 1 is the effectiveness in SF3: 3rd Strike, I was shooting for an 8 in SF HD Remix.

But what about Ryu, the star character? His main tool is his fireball and I was worried about him slipping even lower in the overall rankings if other characters had more answers to fireball traps. The fake fireball is a brilliant answer because it lets him keep his fireball traps, even though other characters can get around them more easily now.

You might wonder what the difference is, if Ryu can fireball trap his opponents in both ST and HD Remix. Why is the fake fireball trap preferable to the previous game’s real fireball trap? The answer is that the fake fireball trap requires more mind-games on both sides of the fight. Ryu still has the tools to trap Bison, Fei Long, Honda, etc, but he must now risk throwing fake fireballs to keep it going. His opponent has a chance to escape if he predicts which fireball is fake, but the opponent will be even worse off if he predicts wrong. Meanwhile, Ryu will be even worse off than in ST if he throws fake fireballs at bad times—after all, the move cannot hit at all! But in the hands of an expert, the fake fireball trap is strong. It’s now a very skill-testing interaction with lots of decisions on both sides, rather than an optimization game where Ryu tries to achieve a nearly unbeatable pattern against some characters.

Before implementing this, I also talked to Nekohashi, one of the best Ryu players in Japan. I asked him for his list of Ryu changes for a new version of Street Fighter and his response was something close to “No changes needed, Ryu’s design is already perfect.” I said ok, but how about this idea of adding just one thing: a fake fireball? Nekohashi said, “Yes! That is a masterpiece. Give him that move and nothing else.” I think Nekohashi probably had similar reasoning to mine above, because I had already explained to him a few ways that various weaker characters would have to avoid fireballs. So with Nekohashi’s blessing, I added the fake fireball to the game very early in development.

Other Use: Rushdown

The fake fireball is classified as a special move, so you can cancel normal moves into it. You can actually recover a little faster than usual from a fierce or roundhouse (f you hit the opponent) by canceling into a fake fireball. This creates new rushdown opportunities for Ryu when he’s up close. Even canceling a ducking short or medium kick into fake fireball often makes the opponent reflexively block (they expect a fireball!), and gives Ryu a chance to throw. So the new move helps him control space from a distance, and it also increases the pressure he can put on from close.

Input Command

The command for the fake fireball is qcf + short. Ryu players tend to fake with short anyway, so this was a natural place for it. Also, putting it only on short kick ensures that you will never ever accidentally get the move when (on button up) you try to do low medium kick or low roundhouse into a real fireball.

Frame Stats

The fake fireball's total duration is 22 frames. Ryu's real fireballs have 12 frames of startup followed by either 41, 42, or 43 frames of recovery, depending on whether you do the jab, strong, or fierce version. In other words, the fake fireball recovers very quickly--Ryu is stuck in the hadoken less than half as long as he is when doing a real fireball.

I originally tried making the fake fireball even faster, taking about the same time it takes to do a standing short kick. A lot of players already faked fireballs with standing short, so I thought that might work. At that speed, it looked like a graphical glitch though, so we tried this 22 frame version next and never looked back. It's really fast, but it needs to be to be good.

Conclusion

Even though Ryu received only one change in SF HD Remix, it’s quite a change and its power ripples through a lot of matches.

Ken was around the middle of the pack in Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo (ST). Rather than give him any single big boost like Ryu’s fake fireball, I decided to juice up several small things about him.

Jab Dragon Punch

During a lot of development, I gave Ken’s jab dragon punch total invulnerability, just like Old Ken had in ST. (In ST, each character has an “old” version with slightly different properties.) I figured that a lot of people wanted that change and it wasn’t overpowered for Old Ken to have it, so why not. After playing with it that way for a long time though, especially in our online beta test, I decided that it was just too mindless. The jab dragon punch is safe on block, so making it totally invulnerable means it's almost always the right thing to do, regardless of what the opponent is doing.

For the final version of HD Remix, Ken’s jab dragon punch is exactly like it was in ST: invulnerable on the way up, but his head is vulnerable at the height of the move. This makes it possible for other characters to hit the dragon punch if they cleverly time their own dragon punch-like moves a few frames after yours. I think the ST designers had this one right to begin with.

Strong Dragon Punch

The strong (medium) dragon punch is another story. I was always frustrated with this type of move in ST. It’s one of several 2-hit moves that don’t knock down on the first hit, but do knock down on the second hit. The intent was that you’d always get that second hit and knock the opponent down, but in practice, it often fails. It especially fails if you dragon punch the opponent’s limb from far away because you’re usually too far to get the second hit. In this case, the opponent can easily hit you back, even though you guessed right. I consider this a bug and these types of moves don’t appear to be working as intended.

My first fix was to make the move a 2-hit attack that juggled, so either hit would knock down. During development we had a bug with juggling system that allowed a few moves (such as Ken’s dragon punches) to go beyond the usual 3-hit juggle limit. As everyone saw in the online beta test, this allowed Ken to do two medium dragon punches to get a total of 4 hits, and usually a dizzy, too. We fixed the bug, limiting this to 3 hits (and no dizzy), but even then the ability to get 3 hits so often from this move was very strong.

I went a different direction, and made the medium dragon punch a one hit attack that always knocks down and is totally invulnerable on the way up. It’s exactly like Old Ken’s medium dragon punch. This works out really well because if you want the most invulnerability in a dragon punch, you can use the medium version (not the jab version!), but it also means your committing to a bigger move and that the opponent will probably be able to hit you back if you guess wrong. Incidentally, this system of a safer, mostly invulnerable jab dragon punch and a totally invulnerable medium dragon punch is exactly like Street Fighter Alpha 2. It worked out well in that game, so I went with that for SF HD Remix.

Fierce Dragon Punch

I gave the fierce dragon punch much more horizontal arc, similar to the huge arc Ken had in SF2: Champion Edition. Unlike Champion Edition though, the fierce dragon punch is not actually invulnerable.

The fierce dragon punch in ST also suffered from that same bug where you hit the enemy but don’t knock them down, and it was even worse than the problem with the medium dragon punch. The fierce version is 3 hits and only the 3rd knocks down so it was very common to hit the enemy, not knock them down, and then get hit back. To fix this, I made all three hits knock down and juggle. This means that if the opponent jumps in, you can now use a deep dragon punch to juggle for three hits (in ST, this would only get you one hit) and it does quite a bit of damage. A deep jab dragon punch does a lot of damage too though, so whatever.

I also kept the fierce dragon punch’s property to hit on the first frame. Hardly any moves in the entire game are able to actually hit on the very first frame they activate, but Ken’s fierce dragon punch and Blanka’s horizontal and vertical rolls can. This property means they can beat safe jumps (see my advanced tutorial about ST to learn what that means.)

Even though some players pressured me to tone down the arc on Ken’s fierce dragon punch, I stuck with it and claimed that it wasn’t overpowered. And when problems arose (see below) with one of Ken’s combos, I wouldn’t back down on keeping the fierce dragon punch a first-frame hitting move. So it took a kind of iron will to keep Ken in the state that you see him in the final version.

In summary, each dragon punch has its own use now:

jab - safest on blockstrong - most invulnerablefierce - biggest arc, juggles, hits on first frame, but least invulnerable and most unsafe

Roundhouse Hurricane Kick

In ST, Ken’s roundhouse hurricane kick had almost no use. In HD Remix, I made it travel much farther and move much faster. This was a somewhat controversial change amongst playtesters because it seemed powerful, but in practice, it wasn’t all that powerful. It let Ken punish a few things he couldn’t before, but it really wasn’t that big of a deal.

What was a big deal was that Ken could reliably hit people with the hurricane kick after his knee bash mixup. That mixup allows Ken to switch sides (or not!) with the opponent, and go for a low attack, which he can then combo into a hurricane kick. Two things you should know here: first, Ken’s hurricane kick (unlike Ryu’s) has a first hit that works against ducking opponents and second, in the Street Fighter 2 series, getting hit by a special move while you’re ducking causes you to stand up. That means that Ken’s knee bash mixup can very easily lead to him hitting you with an entire roundhouse hurricane kick. With the increased speed and range in HD Remix, it was even more likely to get all the hits and dizzy you. To prevent this, I had to reduce the dizzy power of the move by half.

I really wish we could have ended it there and shipped the move in that form, but another problem arose. It was possible to combo a fierce dragon punch after hitting with a roundhouse hurricane kick. Ken could do this in ST as well, but only on certain characters and the conditions to set it up were impractical. The range and speed of the new hurricane kick made this very possible, but difficult. I think it required a 1 frame window of timing, and that sometimes it was literally impossible because that 1 frame is dropped because of the way the game handles game speed. Even still, experts were pulling this off way too frequently and it was devastating in real matches. I had to fix this somehow.

It’s really too much detail to go into why it was hard to fix this, but it was really very hard. The variable dealing with how fast the hurricane kick lands was tied to how fast it rises in the first place, so messing with it would change the height of the move. Adding some recovery after it touched down was technically very difficult because so many parts of the code activated the moment it touched down. Making the fierce dragon punch not hit on the first frame was another solution, but I wouldn’t allow it on principle. With limited programming time allotted for gameplay changes, I was left with no choice but to slow down the new roundhouse hurricane, just to prevent this devastating combo. The final version does travel farther and faster than before, so it does have at least some use in getting across the screen faster and punishing some moves you couldn’t punish before.

Forward (Medium) Hurricane Kick

The medium hurricane kick also travels slightly farther, but it’s hardly even noticeable. This was just to make the jump between short, forward, and roundhouse versions a little smoother.

Short Hurricane Kick

The short version of the hurricane kick now has a shorter duration. This makes it more useful in going over Sagat’s low fireballs or in general anytime you want to go over a sweep and land quickly to dragon punch. I always thought the short version stayed in the air just a little too long in ST.

“Crazy Kicks”

In ST, Ken has three different so-called Crazy Kicks, each with a different joystick motion. These three motions made the kicks generally confusing and they would come out when you didn’t want them. In HD Remix, I changed the commands for these kicks to be similar to the commands in Capcom vs. SNK2. Quarter circle forward + either short, forward, or roundhouse gives you each of the three different kicks, and holding the kick button down makes any of the Crazy Kicks cancel into an overhead. The actual properties of the kicks (speed, hitboxes, damage, etc) are exactly the same as in ST.

They’re just a little easier to keep straight in your head now. Note that, like before, you can easily combo a normal attack into the qcf+medium kick version and with good timing you can combo a sweep after the qcf+short version.

Knee Bash

Ken’s knee bash hold is very powerful. Afterwards, he can walk under most characters and end up on the other side. This means that he might do a low attack from one side or the other side, and then either try for another knee bash or maybe a jab dragon punch. Or, against many characters, he can jump jab right after the knee bash and the spacing is just right for him to “safe jump” (again, see the tutorials on Capcom Classics Collection 2), which lets him go for another knee bash.

The knee bash is, in my opinion, the third most deadly repeated throw trap in ST. This is a close call, but I left it in. Ken is not considered a top tier character, and we’re trying not to nerf the power level of anything unless it’s absolutely necessary. Also, Ken gets so much gameplay out of this mixup that he’d lose a lot of fun-factor if this were removed.

As a bit of a compromise, I reduced the damage on the first hit of the knee bash. I don’t mind the fun gameplay resulting from his mixups, but his ability to get as much as 25% damage off each one was just too much.

I also reduced the range of the knee bash, but by an extremely tiny amount. Because the knee bash has so many advantages over his normal throw, this gives you at least some reason to choose his other throws over the knee bash when you’re walking in from far away.

Super

In ST, there is a bug that prevents Ken from doing a reversal super. That means if he’s knocked down and the enemy makes him get up into a sweep (or any move), he can’t do a super on the first frame he stands up. This bug is fixed in HD Remix, but it remains unfixed in HD Classic Arcade. There’s also a dipswitch setting that lets you play with this bug fixed or unfixed in either mode, if you like.

Conclusion

Ken was a viable, middle-tier character before and now he’s a bit better all around (except for the lower damage knee bash). His strong dragon punch has great invulnerability. The big range on his fierce dragon punch also has several uses, such as stopping a pesky off-the-wall Vega even moreso than before. And his 3-hit anti-air fierce dragon punch, his simpler crazy kicks, and his longer-range roundhouse hurricane kick give him some fun new toys.

Guile is a solid mid-tier character in Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo (ST), but it takes quite a bit of player-skill for him to fulfill that potential. As a mid-tier character, he was eligible for a few upgrades, especially in his bad matchups. More than that, was eligible for some fun.

Crazy New Flash Kick

Guile’s roundhouse flash kick goes straight up very high in ST, and has no use I’m aware of. I’ve never seen a good US or Japanese Guile player use it in a real match, so was a ripe place for some new spice. Instead of traveling straight up, it now travels very far forward and diagonally up just a bit.

Guile players salivate at this newfound range, but it comes with a price. Great flash kicks come with great recovery. If blocked, it’s the most vulnerable move in the game. A fierce Dragon Punch is pretty vulnerable if you block it too, but Guile’s roundhouse flash kick leaves him pushed right up against you so that it’s very easy to time a combo as he recovers.

The new flash kick means you can’t jump straight up and down at mid-range versus him anymore. He can use it as an escape if you try to cross him up. He can use it to trade or even clean hit Dhalsim’s yoga fire at mid-range. He can use it easily hit Vega’s slide, while his old flash kicks often missed in that situation.

Over the course of testing, I had to tone down this move twice, each time removing more of the bottom part of the hitbox (for the roundhouse version only). Guile’s flash kick actually has three different hitboxes over the course of the move. The first two I didn’t change at all, and the Guile’s new forward movement is why these first two hitboxes are better able to hit Vega’s slide now. The third hitbox is the one that’s out during the big flash of the flash kick. In development versions of the game, this hitbox could hit a crouching opponent from about half screen away, and could even punish whiffed sweeps from that far. A lot of the new uses of this move were fine, but hitting crouching opponents wasn’t. In the final version of HD Remix, this move will only hit standing opponents from that far away--still substantially better than hitting nothing at all in ST.

Upside-Down Kick

The upside down kick (hold toward or away + roundhouse while close) always looked like an overhead attack…and now it finally is. The opponent now must block this move high. In addition, you can now also activate it from any range by holding toward + roundhouse (it still has really long range). This kick had 15 frames of startup in ST, which would make it the fastest (and longest range) overhead in the game. I slowed it down to 20 frame startup which puts 2 frames faster than the slowest overhead in the game (Fei Long’s).

Guile is such a defensive character that it’s a breath of fresh air to have a new offensive option. The opponent really should be able to block this overhead most of the time, but Guile can tack it on after making the opponent block a Sonic Boom almost any time he wants, as long as he’s willing to lose his charge. (You have to be pretty close to get the overhead to come out when you’re holding back, remember.)

I also had to monkey with the hitboxes for this move. After the first pass, we realized that he could cleanly upside down kick over Sagat’s low fireballs every single time on reaction. It was too crazy for me, so now those low fireballs will hit Guile in this situation.

Then toward the end of development, playtesters started using this move as a long-range poke and discovered that it was extremely high priority. Even when you knew it was coming, it was very hard for most characters to hit with anything. I think giving Guile some fun offense is in order, but not unstoppable-poke offense. In response to this, I had to lower the priority of the move all around. This has virtually no effect when you use the upside down kick as I intended (sneaking in an overhead here and there, after a Sonic Boom or a knock down), but it put an end to the uber-pokes.

Finally, note that even though Guile appears to be off the ground during the upside-downkick, he can still be thrown. I didn’t change that; it was true in ST also.

Super

Guile’s super move fails to connect correctly all the time in ST. It took about four tries to fix this, but it finally works as it seems like it always should have. The super move consists of two consecutive flash kicks, and the second one has a bit more range now. All the hits also knock down and juggle now, and I even had to do some subtlety about changing how fast the enemy falls when he’s hit by this move. You won’t notice that, but without it, the super would miss air juggle hits on certain characters only. Vega was one of those characters, but now Vega gets juggled like everyone else.

In equally big news, there’s now an optional new motion to perform the super. You can still do the old motion, but the new one is hell of a lot more practical: charge down/back, then down, down/forward, forward, up/forward. In other words, charge down/back, then do the old Tiger Knee motion + kick. Ironically, I removed all other Tiger Knee motions, but it seemed appropriate here considering how complicated the old motion was. (The old motion could be performed charge db, df, ub OR charge db, df, db, any up.)

You might ask, “Won’t I get the super to come out accidentally?” I have never had this happen even once, so I don’t think so. You might also worry that Guile can now easily combo into this super. For the most part, comboing normal moves into supers is not practical in ST (yes, I know you can do it). We could have made it very easy for everyone to combo normals into supers, but the lack of this feature is, in my opinion, one of the nice and defining qualities of the SF2 series. It’s not about poking with safe attacks and comboing into a super. Supers are, for the most part, an additional move in your arsenal rather than a combo ender.

So doesn’t Guile break this rule by easily comboing low strong into super with his new motion? You’d think so, but some deep mysterious property of ST’s engine saves us. I cannot figure why this is true, but you cannot combo normal attacks into Guile’s super using this new motion. If you try, you will always get a flash kick instead. Even more deeply mysterious is that if you try to combo a normal move into super using the old, difficult motion, you CAN. This really shouldn’t be true, but somehow it is. So combing into super is no easier or more difficult than it ever was for Guile. We may never know why.

Yet another strange thing is that you can’t use the button-up technique to do Guile’s super, making it the only special or super move in the game with that property. This is a bug, but I was pretty sure that if a programmer fixed this, he would also have made it so comboing into the super was easy, so I never reported this bug.

The damage on this super also took some tweaking. For most of development, it did substantially more damage against jumping opponents than it did in ST (because it actually juggles correctly). Because Guile gains super meter so quickly, and because the motion for the super is very easy now, players were just getting too much damage of this move too often. I reduced the damage quite a bit. Even with this reduction, in the final version the super still does a little more versus jumping opponents than ST, but not a huge amount. The ground version actually does quite a bit less damage than in ST, but the easy motion, knockdown property, and slight extra range on the second part of the super means that it’s much, much more practical to use in real gameplay, so in the end, this is a buff rather than a nerf.

Things That Didn’t Change

One of the most common requests from players was to change around the commands of Guile’s standing kicks. In ST (and HD Remix), the kicks are:

Back + short = knee (advances Guile while charging)

Back + medium kick = backward sobat (Guile jumps slightly off the ground and moves back while kicking)

The common request is to find some way to make back + short into Old Guile’s rapid fire kicks. This would allow Guile to rapidly standing short to stop incoming slides while keeping his charge. I admit, this would be useful against Blanka, and Blanka is a bad match for Guile, but we can’t fix everything. The new roundhouse flash kick hits the other slides anyway.

More to the point though, no one could ever agree on which move Guile should lose of the above three. The knee is incredibly useful and basic to his gameplay, so that needs to stay for sure. The back sobat is not used much by most players, but the experts find it indispensable because of a few important, specific things it counters (Dhalsim’s drill at a certain range is one, and there are others). And Guile players were not willing to lose the back + roundhouse lunge kick either. Rather than assign the knee to back + jab + short (strange for a normal move), I just left all those kicks as-is.

I hope Guile players won’t complain about that, because with a huge new flash kick, a long range overhead kick, and an easier, better super, Guile players should thank their lucky stars.

Bad Matchups Mostly Gone

Vega was a very bad match for Guile before, and a lot of it had to do with how hard it is to counter Vega’s slide. It’s good news that he now has a better answer. Sagat was a very tough mach as well, though not so much anymore due to Sagat’s slightly worse fireball recovery. Guile’s worst match was probably versus Dhalsim, so his ability to do *something* at mid-range now combined with Dhalsim’s inability to low punch cleanly under Sonic Booms brings this match from near-hopeless to near-fair. Blanka is still a tough match for Guile, and it's unfortunate that this bad matchup isn't any better for Guile in HD Remix. That said, Guile players should be very happy that three out of his four bad matchups have been addressed. Practice that Blanka match and you'll be very hard to counter indeed.

E.Honda was one of the most controversial characters during development. In Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo (ST), he has some really bad matches and is considered maybe the 9th or 10th best character in the game. Certainly not dominating, so he needs some boosts.

Fat Man Needs Help Against Fireballs

I considered my first pass on him to be pretty uncontroversial. He has a huge disadvantage against fireball characters, so I gave him some extra tools to deal with that, but nothing super strong. First, his jumping short can now hit sweeps. In more recent Street Fighter games, if you jump in and land on a sweep, you can still block it. That feature is called “trip guard” and it doesn’t appear in ST or HD Remix. If you jump in, the opponent can make you land on a sweep in the SF2 series. This is especially bad for Honda in that he gets knocked down, then pushed out by fireballs, and is then stuck in that same repeating pattern. He certainly can win, but it’s very hard. To see how hard, watch Japanese Honda champion Kusumondo attempt to get anywhere near Alex Valle's Ken at Evolution 2008.

A jumping short that hits sweeps is a way of giving trip guard to just Honda. At first this sounds powerful, but in practice it’s a little less powerful than you might think. Because of the way hitboxes are shaped on sweep attacks, they will still hit a jumping Honda if the sweep is done very far away right at the tip. So Ken and Ryu can still attempt that same old pattern, but it requires much more careful spacing on their part. Next, fireball characters can shift to other strategies to keep you out, such as relying on different anti-air attacks or jump attacks. Finally, it’s pretty important to realize that you can still keep Honda away in a similar way by just delaying your sweep and letting him land. This way, you won’t get hit by his jump short (he already landed) and you’ll force him to block a sweep, then block a fireball. This keeps Honda away, but is less damaging to him so he gets more chances to try to get in.

Next, in ST Honda has a move that people call the “floating fierce.” If you jump straight up and press fierce, you can then steer him left or right. This is helpful in avoiding fireballs. In HD Remix, the distance he moves left or right is greater, so it’s easier to avoid fireballs this way.

Then there’s the hundred hand slap, performed by mashing on punch buttons. As part of a global change to all mash moves, it’s now easier to get the Hundred Hands to come out.

And then there’s his super. It’s considered one of the very worst in the game in ST because the first hit doesn’t even knock down and there’s enough time between the first and second hit to Dragon Punch Honda out of it, even if he hits. It’s a generally sad super that has only one saving grace: it can be "stored." After doing the motion for the super (which ends with holding the joystick forward) you can keep holding it forward and then press punch whenever you want.

In HD Remix, I removed the storing property on the super, but greatly improved the super. It now knocks down on the first hit and juggles (with itself). That means if you hit with it from full screen, the first hit will knock down, the second hit will then juggle them, then they will be fully knocked down. Even though it doesn’t do much damage from that distance, it functions correctly and gives you a chance to pressure them as they get up, which is exactly what Honda wants to do. Remember that this move can destroy fireballs, too, just like it did in ST. Also, because of the new juggling property, if you hit with it at just the right range (pretty close, but not point-blank) you can get a three hit version that does about 50% damage, even as anti-air. In practice, I think it will be pretty rare to hit with it in that way because the opponent usually has to make some major mistakes to ever put himself into a situation where it could even happen. More likely, you’ll just get the 20% or so from the 2-hit version from far away.

Fat Man Still Loses to Fireballs, But Still (Too) Good Otherwise

At this point, tournament champion John Choi said that although Honda was better, he still lost those matches against fireball characters. Choi suggested making the jab version of the torpedo move destroy fireballs. I told Choi that was the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard and I moved on.

That was my complete list of changes for Honda in the first builds of the game. My goal was to give him a better chance in his bad matches, but not necessarily enough that he even had advantage in those matches, just so that he had a better chance. Some of the expert players involved in playtesting said that it made Honda way too good, but not for reasons you might think. They weren’t saying that he was too dominant against fireball characters, they were saying that all the old reasons why he won a lot of matches against non-fireball characters were still there. So, they said, he still dominates lots of characters (even their HD Remix versions) and he’s not as bad off against fireball characters either. He needs some weakness, they said.

How To Weaken?

Fair enough, but what to do? Suggestions included reducing damage on the hundred hands, reducing priority on hundred hands (that move really wrecks some characters), reducing dizzy power on the ochio throw, preventing the ochio throw from being repeated in the corner, and removing the stored property on the ochio throw. (Similar to the stored property on the super, that means he can do the motion, hold the final direction—down/back—then press punch much later to get the ochio throw to come out).

Other players scoffed at these ideas, saying that even one single nerf, much less a whole slew of them, was totally inappropriate for the 9th or 10th best character in the game. He needs whatever he can get, they said. The other players countered, saying that his middle-ranking is misleading. They pointed out that he is extremely dominant in many matches, but that he has big trouble in others. The reason for his low ranking is his problem matches, but when they aren’t so problematic anymore, he shoots up to near the top.

My usual standard of proof is if people can beat me at the game. I said I would play any character in the game versus someone’s Honda, and invited people to make me afraid of Honda. Tournament player James Chen chose Cammy for me, versus his Honda. I said that with all of Cammy’s upgrades, I’d be fine. I have a pretty good record in these types of challenges, maybe only 5 times out of dozens did someone make their case. Chen definitely made his case. Even the improved Cammy with her safe cannon drills and easy hooligan throw had a monstrously difficult time against Honda. His hundred hands are practically impossible to hit, deal lots of blocked damage and tons of damage on hit. When cannon drills and hundred hands start flying, Honda easily gets ahead in damage, then just sits there and does nothing. He can of course do nothing from the start of the match too, and make up for blocking many cannon drills with just one well-placed hundred hand slap. And you can forget trying to hooligan throw if he’s on his toes. To top it all off, at close range Honda has the deadly ochio throw which he can even threaten to repeat in the corner.

I was willing to admit the problem was real. And yet, it felt very wrong to give any of these nerfs. Even if they are justified against Cammy, they certainly aren’t against Guile because that match is so difficult for Honda. When the players were discussing ochio throw nerfs, I once blurted out that Honda deserved to do 100% damage with that move if it hit Guile. (If you don’t believe that, try playing against John Choi’s Guile. Or Kurahashi’s or Muteki’s if you’re in Japan.)

So we have this problem where it’s still very hard to get in on some characters and when you do, you deserve huge damage and the unfairly good properties of the ochio throw. But you don’t really deserve those against characters who are trying to get in on you, like Cammy or Fei Long. What to do? I explained the problem to tournament player Julien Beasley and he gave a very unexpected answer. He said he thought Choi was right all along: make the jab torpedo destroy fireballs.

Jab Torpedo Destroys Fireballs??

Beasley said it solved the whole puzzle. If you make getting in on Guile a little less impossible, then you don’t need to deal 100% damage when you do. This was the same principle that was at work with rebalancing T.Hawk, by the way. T.Hawk’s new dive lets him get in more easily, so that’s why it’s ok to remove his 100% throw trap by giving him a throw whiff. For Honda, giving yet another option versus fireball characters makes those other nerfs ok. Beasley even asked me if, as a player, I would take a fireball-destroying jab torpedo in exchange for the whole list of nerfs other players proposed. I said probably yes. I said this left only one problem: the idea is stupid and makes no sense. But then we figured that some graphical effect on the move would explain it at least as well as why Zangief’s green hand destroys fireballs, so why not try it.

Here’s the actual list of changes in version 2 of Honda:

Jab torpedo destroys fireballs and has subtle graphic effect

Ochio throw does same dizzy as any throw, rather than double the dizzy

Ochio throw bounces backwards afterwards, rather than forwards, to prevent the loop in the corner

Hundred Hands deal less damage and have worse priority

First hit of super travels slightly slower, but second hit travels faster

That new ochio bounce means that regardless of whether the opponent is midscreen or cornered, the ochio throw leads to a guessing game with nothing guaranteed. Afterwards Honda can do a torpedo, a flying butt, the hundred hands, a sweep, or wait a bit to bait a move, then one of those options. There is no guaranteed follow-up or real trap though.

Everyone seemed satisfied with this new direction in playtesting. The players found so many ways to beat the jab torpedo, that they weren’t worried about it being overpowering. (Though I'm still a bit worried...) Basically, you can bait it, then punish the recovery. Ken sweep it. Ryu can sweep it or red fireball it. Guile can backhand it. Sagat can juggle with 3-hits of tiger knees. The move is very powerful when it’s done from a distance close enough where it will destroy a fireball and hit the recovery of the fireball thrower, but it must be done a bit early to make that work. The startup cannot destroy fireballs, so you have to already be flying through the air or you’ll just get hit by the fireball.

Yomi Layer 3

From far way, it’s also all about predicting. If you are far, see the opponent’s fireball, then jab torpedo on reaction, the opponent can usually recover fast enough to hit you somehow. But if you guess and do your torpedo a bit early, you’ll be safe and you will have advanced, which is really good for you. Of course, your opponent could counter that by not throwing the fireball then walking toward you and sweeping you (the jab torpedo doesn’t go that far, remember). But then you can somewhat counter that by doing the fierce torpedo and make him walk right into it! But then, he could counter that by doing a fireball in the first place because the fierce torpedo doesn’t destroy fireballs. The point is that there’s a lot of gameplay going on here and people really liked it.

More testing did lead to some tweaks though. I had to keep reducing the damage and priority on the hundred hands quite a bit to get them bad enough where opponents could actually hit the move. I also had to make the jab torpedo travel a shorter distance just because of the match against Sagat (Sagat’s arms stick out pretty far and the torpedo was too good against him.)

Jab Torpedo Is Really Good

We were very concerned with the jab torpedo's ability to destroy fireballs, but that turned out to be fine. It worked exactly as we hoped. But unrelated to that, the jab torpedo is also an excellent reversal move. It's invulnerable and safe on block. James Chen said that it would be better if the jab torpedo had worse hitboxes, possible identical ones to the fierce torpedo so that it's no longer a good reversal move. It would mean Honda would have to use his medium buttslam as a reversal instead. Opponents would then have some way to punish it.

In retrospect, I really wish we made that change. In HD Remix, just like in ST, Honda's ability to sit in block and do an invulnerable, safe reversal leads to boring situations against characters without a fireball. It's not the worst thing in the world, but apart from fixing Akuma's bugs, it's the one of the only two things I really wish I could change now (the main one is making Balrog's jab headbutt a worse reversal). I do stress that everything we did do with Honda turned out great, so it's not that big a deal that we didn't do one more thing.

Conclusion

The end result of all these changes is that there’s a lot more thinking going on in Honda matches. When he’s trying to get in, the old, fairly mindless patterns of keeping him out don’t work as well anymore. Instead, you each have several options that you need to consider. But once Honda gets in, his old, fairly mindless pattern of repeated ochio throws no longer works, so you both need to be on your toes there too. Honda’s less dominant in his good matches and less dominated in his bad ones, and more thoughtful all around.

Blanka is considered bottom tier in Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo (ST), but even in that game he has a lot of potential and a lot of things going for him. The throw range on his bite is enormous. His crossup (jumping short) is excellent and easy. After the crossup, you can go for a combo, a bite, a blocked hit into a bite, another crossup, or a blocked hit into another crossup. Also, Blanka’s roll attack does really good damage. HD Remix Blanka retains all those good features, and gets some boosts.

Horizontal Rolling Attack

In ST, most characters can hit back Blanka’s roll after blocking or even being hit by it. In HD Remix, it recovers faster, but it’s still not completely safe. Dhalsim and Balrog are still able to hit it back easily (with standing fierce and jab rushing punch, respectively). Bison can still hit it back with a well-timed Psycho Crusher. But Honda no longer gets a free hit after the roll, and Ryu no longer gets a free red fireball. Blanka actually lands fast enough from his roll to jump over a fireball if Ryu throws one right away. That’s quite an upgrade from getting hit back and knocked down every time, and it’s even a little better than I wanted. I would have preferred if Blanka had to block Ryu’s fireball after Ryu blocked Blanka’s roll, but making even this small change made the roll much too unsafe against too many things from too many other characters.

There are two other upgrades to the horizontal roll. First, the jab and strong versions travel a slightly shorter distance than before. This makes the old tactic of whiffing a roll into a bite even better than before. Furthermore, the jab and strong rolls now have the same rotation speed and sound effect as the fierce roll, so you can’t tell which roll is coming by the way it spins or the sound. This is conceptually similar to Ryu’s fake fireball in that you’re not sure if a real roll or a whiffed roll into bite is coming.

As playtesting progressed, Blanka distinguished himself as a top character. He was rarely played in ST because of extremely weak matches against Ryu and Old Sagat, but he now does fine in those matches and probably has an advantage against Sagat. Meanwhile, his good matches were still good: he still has advantage versus Vega, Zangief, and Guile. Zangief has many upgrades in HD Remix, but Blanka’s standing strong can still shut down every one of Zangief’s jumping attacks, his roll is still safe, and just jumping straight up roundhouse is still tough for Zangief to deal with too.

My point is that Blanka’s power level started to be a concern, and it really bothered me that he could fierce roll all day against Zangief with little worry. His roll does lots of damage and nearly always results in a favorable trade, and it’s one of the very few moves in the entire game that hits on the first frame. In order to give this move some drawback, I made him take more damage if he’s hit out of it. This is similar to how the move worked in Street Fighter 2: World Warrior, but the damage penalty isn’t as huge as in that game. Blanka only takes extra damage if you hit him out of the horizontal roll itself, not the recovery. This lets Zangief try to low fierce the roll for good damage, and also lets Vega and Cammy try to trade with it without coming out way behind in damage on trades.

And one last note on the fierce roll: I know that Fei Long can use good timing to hit it back with rekka punches x 3 every time. In the end, I decided to leave this because there was no way I was going to make the roll recover even faster and Fei Long needs that extra range on his new rekka punches. Besides, with Blanka having most (all?) of his counter matches fixed, I didn’t feel too bad for him having to play carefully against Fei Long.

Diagonal Rolling Attack (Rainbow Roll)

The so-called Beast Roll or Rainbow Roll was not at all useful in ST. It has long startup time as Blanka jumps back before rolling and it has long recovery, allowing almost every character to hit Blanka back, even if he hits with this move. In HD Remix, the initial hop back part is greatly sped up, and the recovery is drastically improved. Blanka actually recovers before the enemy if they block this move, allowing him to keep up his pressure. At mid screen, it’s now a realistic way to go over fireballs, but the hop back part of the move still leaves Blanka vulnerable to a solid fireball trap.

Hop

The hop is a pretty good move, allowing Blanka to move around quickly and hop into position to throw. The old command is press all three kicks while holding either away or toward on the joystick. This motion still works, but now you can use either jab+short, strong+forward, or fierce+roundhouse instead of three kicks, if you like. This is a great benefit to players who use a gamepad, but even I prefer the jab+short command on a joystick. I find it easier to hit those two buttons quickly than any other two because my thumb and index finger rest on these buttons. If your mileage varies, you can always use the original command, though.

The hop back has the same invulnerability from the ST, but it generates much less super meter now. The hop forward has an additional nine frames of foot invulnerability which theoretically allows him to hop over sweeps somewhat, but in practice this has not proven all that effective.

Vertical Ball

The vertical ball is unchanged, but I just want to point out that it’s one of the only moves in the game that can hit on the very first frame. This makes it incredibly good air defense and it’s impossible to “safe jump” against Blanka because of this (see the video tutorials on Capcom Classics Collection 2). The move is also vulnerable on the first frame which means Blanka often trades, but the trade usually does damage in his favor and leaves the enemy knocked down, allowing Blanka to go for his tricky crossup short.

Note that we did fix a bug with this move. In ST, moves that can hit on the first frame have an unintended property that if the opponent tries to block them on the very first frame, there is a 50% chance the move will hit anyway. These 1-frame semi-unblockables are fixed in HD Remix (but left unfixed in HD Classic Arcade). You can toggle this bug on/off in each mode with the dipswitch settings, too.

Electricity

The properties of this move are unchanged, but fewer mashes on the punch buttons are required to activate electricity.

Super

Blanka’s super is one of the worst in the game in ST, so it’s improved in HD Remix. The startup is faster and the recovery is faster so it doesn’t get hit back all the time on block like it did before. You can actually use it just for the sake of getting close and going for crossups, if you like. If the move hits, it will now always knock down.

Conclusion

Blanka’s rolling attacks are the main upgrades here, allowing him to roll more safely against some of his biggest enemies, such as Ryu, Sagat, and Honda. His diagonal roll gives him a new pressure option that also doubles as a way around fireballs. That said, fireball characters can still keep Blanka in check (back away and sweep the diagonal roll as it ends or just dragon punch it). Blanka's bad matches are lot closer now and he has several new favorable matches.

Zangief is an interesting character in Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo (ST) in that he is considered bottom tier, yet he is scary enough that he can win. One time in Tokyo, I saw that champion Zangief player Kuni was next up to play and his opponent was Dhalsim (very hard match!). I asked Kuni if he could win. His response: “If you can thread the needle, then you can win Zangief vs. Dhalsim.” Indeed. Amazingly, even Kuni has his superior, who he refers to as his Master: Pony Zangief. Pony famously beat several Dhalsim players in quick succession in a Tokyo vs. Osaka tournament.

I’d like ordinary humans to be able to play and enjoy Zangief, not just superheroes like Kuni and Pony. This first set of changes is for ordinary humans and has very little effect on the experts.

SPD Command

The SPD (Spinning Piledrive) command has a lot of footnotes. First of all, many players complained that doing an SPD after a ducking short was harder with the new motion than it was in ST, which defeats the entire purpose of having an “easier” motion. In response to this, you no longer need to even do the first forward or back input. You can hold d/f and then go down, d/b, back, forward + punch. Also, that last input can be substituted for any up command (u/b, u, or u/f) and it still works.

For old curmudgeons, the original 360 command (which actually only requires 270 degrees, fyi) is still there too.

All this stuff makes the SPD command significantly easier, but it really doesn’t seem to affect balance much at all. Expert Zangiefs could SPD with amazing precision anyway, and they still can. Now the common man can do it too. I actually would have liked it a bit more if we made you do one extra input on the SPD if you skip that first input, but the easy SPDs have worked out fine in playtesting. The real challenge is getting into a situation where you can actually land the move with Zangief anyway.

Super Command

Next up, the super. Note that original 720 command is no longer there, sorry. The new command (that can be done without jumping) is a fine replacement though! Note that the shortcut that we allow for the 360 do NOT work for the super. You must start the command with either forward or back, not with d/f. This is the one change to commands that really does affect the experts, because it makes a “walking 720” possible. That said, remember that Zangief has extremely short range on his super.

Green Hand Command

The Green Hand is a dragon punch command in later SF games, but it seems unfortunate that Zangief needs a more complex motion to do green hand than the opponent needs to do a fireball. In HD Remix, I made it a fireball command: qcf+punch. This should be a welcome chance from the old forward, d/f, down + punch command, because that command often made the green hand come out on accident when you were trying to walk up then do low jabs. Although the new command kind of barely overlaps with the SPD command, it really doesn’t overlap if you do the SPD properly.

Lariat Command

The alternate commands for the lariat are mostly for pad players. On a standard controller, it’s easier to use your thumb to hit jab+short than it is to hit 2 or 3 kick buttons. I prefer the new command on a joystick too, personally. You can still use the original PPP or KKK commands, but notice that you CANNOT use 2 punches (or 2 kicks) to lariat, as in some console versions. The PP and KK commands interfere with advanced players using the “piano method” of inputs for the SPD. If you have no idea what that means, check out my advanced tutorial video about Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo.

New Stuff!

So the commands are easier, but what are the real tools Zangief has to compete now?

Green Hand with Less Recovery

Green hand now has 4 frames less recovery. Earlier development versions had even less recovery, but they proved disastrous. The purpose of the green hand is to destroy fireballs, and the 4-frame faster recovery makes it a little more practical. It also allows Zangief to pressure a bit and threaten an SPD if he does the move from fairly far away. Do it too close and you’ll still get hit back though.

For most of the development of HD Remix, the green hand also knocked down. This was originally John Choi’s suggestion of how to give Zangief a chance against Dhalsim (try to hit his limbs, knock down, then get in). It was actually very fair in that particular match, but it raised more and more questions in other matches. It flat out beat Bison because trading with Bison’s standing kicks (Bison’s main strategy in that match) leads to a virtually guaranteed win if you get a knock down. I was somewhat willing to live with that, but more and more and more problems surfaced. The knock down version of green hand was simply too strong in too many matches and lead to strange gameplay for Zangief. Rather than a throw character, he became a knock-down-with-green-hand character, then maybe throw. So green hand does NOT knock down in the final version of HD Remix (and did not in ST, either).

Faster Running Grab

Running Grab is much faster. The roundhouse version is the most significant and it travels fast. You can catch turtles off guard with it, and at some ranges it’s even guaranteed after a blocked low medium kick! The only reason this move remains fair is that it still does very little damage and leaves Zangief kind of far away.

Kick Lariat’s Invulnerable Feet

Many people requested a kick lariat that was like Hyper Fighting’s, in that it has invulnerable feet. I tried many versions of this, and it was extremely powerful in the ecosystem of this game. Many, many times during the course of development, someone claimed that something is too powerful. My usual response is to say, “Ok beat me with it, or at least make me afraid of it.” I can count on one hand the number of times anyone really did this. Graham Wolfe certainly did in this case. He told me to pick whichever character I thought could beat the HF lariat most easily. He then proceeded to absolutely destroy me by mixing up punch and kick lariat while not even really paying attention to the match. I had to counter them in different ways and guessing wrong meant knock down, then facing SPDs.

The final version works like this. The kick lariat is the same as ST except it has a different sound effect and the feet are invulnerable during the first rotation only. You can use it for some footsie tricks, but a careful opponent can still counter it by sweeping you, as long as he sweeps late, toward the end of the lariat.

Punch Lariat’s Feet Can Hit

The punch lariat has a functional change, too. In ST, both lariats have a really big attack hitbox that appears for only a few frames near the start of the move. In HD Remix, the punch lariat’s version of this hitbox extends all the way to the floor, so it can hit low attacks. Remember that only the very start of the move has this property and if you try to hit a low attack this way, you’re committing to doing an entire punch lariat, which is pretty long. This is somewhat useful at hitting Dhalsim’s low fierce and it seems theoretically good at hitting Guile’s low forward, but in practice it’s very difficult to hit Guile with it. At least it’s something though.

Anti-Vega Normals

Vega is a tough opponent here for a lot of different reasons. One reason is Vega’s off-the-wall attack is extremely difficult for Zangief to hit if Vega does it repeatedly and tries to hit at the tip of the claw. Zangief has two slight changes to deal with this. First, his jumping strong hitbox extends farther now and actually matches up with the graphics for his hand, similar to the jump strong hitbox in Street Fighter Alpha 2. In practice, it’s still pretty hard to hit wall dives with this move though.

More importantly, his low fierce has a hitbox that extends upward 2 pixels more than before. This very tiny change is barely enough to make it beat Vega’s wall dive most of the time. Considering how hard this match is in general, I’m hoping Vega will still be fine here, he’ll just have to use different strategies.

The Hop!

Last and not least is the new hop. In fact, this might be the most substantial change of all. In ST, Zangief had four different commands for this move: back+strong, toward+strong, back+fierce, and toward+fierce. All four lead to a worthless move that usually got you killed. The move now has only one command: toward+fierce, the same command as X-ism Zangief in Street Fighter Alpha 3.

The move is significantly faster, hops higher over low moves, and recovers almost instantly. Hop into SPD is a strong tactic. The hop goes over low attacks well, and you can even combo a sweep after it if you somehow manage to hit a standing opponent with it. Really though, whiffing the hop is where it’s at. This mixup between doing lariats and the new hop was strong enough that some players were worried about Zangief being too good, but considering his former bottom tier status and the improvements of other characters across the board, I think he needs this to compete. If you look for it the hop, you can stand fierce it on reaction with Ken/Ryu. Or, you can let it land and go for low forward, fireball combo (though his recovery is so short that this requires good timing on your part).

Conclusion

Easier commands, tricky lariats, a faster green hand, anti-Vega attacks, and deadly good hop are what you get. Zangief is quite a threat now. That said, he still loses to literally half the cast (Cammy, Blanka, Fei Long, Vega, Chun Li, Sagat, Honda, Guile to name a few). He has enough tools that having good player skill can help you overcome those matchup disadvantages even more realistically, and he's far more accessible to more players with his easier control motions.

Chun Li is notable in Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo (ST) for how few bad matches she has. She doesn’t really dominate her opponents, but she doesn’t get dominated either. Old Sagat is usually seen as her hardest match, but expert Chun Lis learned how to get by even in that match. The lack of bad matches is why Chun Li is usually ranked near the top of the 2nd tier, or even in the top tier by a few players.

Early in development, many players considered Chun Li the benchmark character and hoped that other characters could be as well-rounded and solid as her. The first version of HD Remix Chun Li had exactly one change, which was the complete change-list suggested by US Chun Li player NKI:

Remove d/f + medium kick backflip move.

That move has no useful purpose and usually just gets you killed. Sure it could be improved, but the natural improvement would be make it travel farther away, which would just make her better at running away. By removing it, Chun Li players can now do low forward at will without worrying about this move coming out.

Players Wanted More

My one-change Chun Li did not go over very well. All these other characters got interesting toys, why does Chun Li get nothing, players said. Also, Chun Li has some kind of mindless abuseable stuff, why should she keep that if other characters don’t? Couldn't we give her an interesting new tool while taking out some of her mindless stuff? Good points.

Lighting Legs

The next change was to make her lightning legs easier to do, in an effort to make all mashing-moves easier to do. Low forward -> lighting Legs, for example, is very easy now and stand fierce -> lighting legs is practical. This made her stand fierce so deadly that I really had to reduce the damage and dizzy from the lighting legs. The priority of the lighting legs (the best priority move in the entire game that is not invulnerable) is also barely, barely worse so that maybe Balrog or Bison could hit her during that move (though not very reliably). That said, if you whiff a dragon punch or something, she can now punish with stand fierce -> lighting legs, even if you do not have super powers.

Spinning Bird Kick

Players clearly wanted something new for her. Remember that my original mission was to make the game more accessible, improve tournament balance, and to add fun wherever it wouldn't ruin tournament balance. I tried to give her something new that would be kind of interesting, but not actually help that much because she’s already so good. That’s where the new spinning bird kick came in. It now has a parabolic arc, similar to Sakura’s spinning kick in Street Fighter Alpha 2 and 3, except higher. It juggles, does fairly good dizzy, and can go over fireballs if timed right, but it was mostly a trickshot move. Let’s come back to it in a bit.

Stored Super

In ST, Chun Li can “store” her super by doing charge back, forward, back, then hold forward as long as she wants….then press punch to super. Whether she should keep this was very controversial throughout development. On the one hand, it’s pretty mindless when you can walk at the opponent and mash on strong to get a good priority strong punch, or a throw if they are throwable….while simultaneously threatening to super them with just a single button press on kick. The super has an almost-always guaranteed followup of up kicks. Super + up kicks does 80% damage. Yes, you read that right--80%. Something has to give here, especially with the overall goal of brining supers down to 50% or less. But on the other hand, stored super is fun and everyone seems to want it.

My proposal was to slightly reduce the damage so that it’s similar damage to other supers in HD Remix, to add invulnerability at the start so it can go through fireballs more easily, and to remove the storing property. If I made the game for myself, this would have been my decision. But players seemed generally unhappy and disappointed with this. The final version lets her keep her stored super, does not add any invulnerability over what she had in ST, but greatly reduces the damage of the super and limits up kicks to just 1-hit. (The up kicks seem to miss entirely on some characters, too.) In practice, her super ends up doing about half the 80% from ST, but all the storing tricks are left intact.

When I explained the debate to former Evolution champion Tokido, from Japan, he responded, “I understand the balance idea here, but I think if you remove stored super…Japanese players will not like. I think you should leave it, but reduce damage, as you did.” Thanks Tokido!

Neckbreaker Loop

Chun Li players are probably pretty sad at this point. There’s more bad news, then some good news. Many players complained that her neckbreaker kick (d/f + roundhouse) should be on the list of abuseable, repeatable moves. This is the move where Chun Li flips up (over fireballs if she wants) then comes down with an attack that knocks down. If she does it again as the victim stands up, it can be a cross-up versus several characters. It’s basically impossible to tell whether you should block left or right if you are one of these unlucky characters, and Chun Li can alter her spacing by a few pixels to kind of trap you in this repeated knockdown thing. She really does not need this to win, so many players requested that this be removed. It’s an incredibly long story what went on with this move in development, so I’ll just cut to the end. It now travels slightly less distance forward which means it can never cross-up. It’s still useful to go over fireballs and to pressure stand strong / throw afterwards, if the opponent blocks. It still knocks down on hit.

Spinning Bird Kick, Revisited

And now for some better news. After the decision to let Chun Li keep her stored super but greatly reduce her damage, I thought she needed an upgrade to stay competitive. That’s when I greatly improved the new arcing spinning bird kick. It travels much faster and has much less recover than it did in the earlier versions. You can try to cross-up with it. You can go over fireballs with it and safely attack with it from the right range. If the opponent is far away and tries to sweep as you land, it’s extremely hard for them to hit you. Even if you do get hit, you cannot be combo’d because you flip up if you get hit (you get hit out of the air). If you try the move from too close, it’s very easy for the opponent to stop it because Chun Li is completely vulnerable underneath, but if you do it from the right range, it’s a pretty solid attack.

Several players also requested that she be able to do her aerial spinning bird kick after her pogo attack, like in SF2: Hyper Fighting. They weren’t asking for any practical reason, they just had fun doing that back then, and so did I. So the aerial version can now be done with a flash kick motion as well as a sonic boom motion while in the air.

It turns out that this does have some interesting uses. If you are on the ground and charge down, the go up, then hesistate a moment, then press kick, you can do the aerial version (which travels horizontally, not in an arc) very low to the ground. You can even choose whether to do this move toward the opponent, mostly in place, or away from the opponent depending on which way you jumped. I’ve been able to use this move in many tricky situations to go over sweeps, to escape attacks, bait dragon punches, and so on.

I saw a few requests to change the command for her pogo move from down+medium kick while in the air to any of the three down positions. I made change this and loved it because it made doing the pogo (and then aerial Spinning Bird Kick!) much easier. All the actual Chun Li players booed and sent me nasty letters though. They need her aerial down/back + medium kick to be her crossup attack still, they said. So be it.

I should have made a secret Chun Li just for me, huh? (Mine would have had no stored super, higher damage super, more invulnerable super, and pogo can be down with any of the three down positions of the joystick). Chun Li is a case where I was very conscious of feedback from actual Chun Li players, rather than my own whims, so I hope that turns out well for everyone.

Conclusion

The bad:

Lighting Legs less damage and dizzy

Super less damage

Neckbreaker no longer crosses up

The good:

Lighting Legs easier to do

New arcing Spinning Bird Kick is fairly useful

New motion or aerial Spinning Bird Kick leads to some tricks

Chun Li’s fireballs, awesome normal attacks, and damaging throw are just as good as ever. She even got to keep her stored super. With some of her mindlessness decreased and some new tricks added, she remains competitive while being even a little more interesting than before.

Dhalsim is squarely in the top tier of Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo (ST) and he’s pretty universally accepted as one of the top 2 characters in that game, along with Balrog (the boxer).

He can keep away, he can go on offense, and he’s got an answer for pretty much everything. On top of all that, he’s also pretty good at keeping some characters in a throw loop of repeated noogies. His throw range is so long that he can hit some characters just outside of their throw range, then noogie them. Considering all the things Dhalsim is great at, he doesn’t need this throw abuse to win.

Shorter Range Noogie

Dhalsim’s noogie (his hold with the medium punch button) now has shorter range. He can still attempt a throw trap, but only from close enough that the opponent can reverse it. The range on his fierce throw is unchanged (still far!) so he can still “cheap” into a fierce throw. Remember that the fierce throw tosses the opponent away so that Dhalsim cannot repeat the trap very easily.

New Control Motions

Dhalsim’s yoga fire was--and still is--qcf+p. The yoga flame command is a bit too similar in ST, though. The half-circle-forward sometimes comes out accidentally if you’re not careful when trying to yoga fire. To correct this, later Street Fighter games changed the command to half-circle-back + punch. To be consistent, that means the upward yoga flame is half-circle-back + kick, and the super is hcb x 2 + punch.

To encourage people to actually try to use the upward yoga flame, I set the motion to qcb+k, and it really did feel much better. But then I painted myself into a corner. Shouldn’t yoga flame be qcb+p and the super be qcb x 2 + p, to be consistent? It borders on violating the scared to make yoga flame not a half circle, but that upward yoga flame sure feels good on qcb…and qcb+p feels pretty good for the regular yoga flame. It’s tough weighing the history of the series with what’s practical today, but I chose to shorten both versions of yoga flame to the qcb command.

I tried the super with a qcb x 2 + p command also, but the shorter time to perform the motion gave Dhalsim too good of a damaging anti-air attack. It’s now half-circle-back x 2 + punch.

The teleport was always a really frustrating move to do. It required you either do a dragon punch or reverse dragon punch motion, then press 3 kick or 3 punch buttons. We lessened the requirement to just 2 kick or 2 punch buttons (though you can press all 3 if you like) and the timing window on the dragon punch command is more lenient and not random. That teleport only had 3 frames of recovery in the original game, but no one noticed how good it was because it was just too hard to perform. Now that it’s easier, it has 9 frames recovery. It’s not longer, but more frames at the end are vulnerable. It’s still a nice escape though.

Command Summary

Super

Dhalsim’s super does a LOT of damage in ST. About 60% of a lifebar. I reduced the damage to around 50%, to go along with Balrog’s reduction (also to about 50%) and Chun Li’s reduction.

My point is that while Dhalsim’s super does a bit less damage, it’s not a nerf to him specifically, just a general attempt to get supers down to 50%, which is still a whole lot of damage.

Dhalsim’s super is also ridiculously invulnerable in ST. Even if you jump over the flame part, you can’t hit his head, and even if you jump behind him, you can’t throw him during most of the super. Both of those have changed. If you get on the other side of him, you can throw him, and if you manage to get over that huge super flame, you can kick him in the head. Also the amount of super meter he gains from doing both types of yoga flames is slightly reduced.

Finally, Dhalsim’s super can now be done as a reversal attack, fixing a bug from ST.

New Upflame

I have played the Dhalsim vs. Vega match (as Vega) in many, many tournaments, usually versus two-time US National Champion Jason Cole. It is my theory that Vega wins “most of this match,” but that he loses very badly to a throw loop. Cole has proven in many tournaments that he can reliably kill me with just that, even though I do just fine during the “actual fighting” part of the match. Incidentally, I was the only player to defeat Japanese player Gian in a tournament match at Evolution 2005 (he won the singles ST tournament), and I used Vega vs. his Dhalsim. He should have done more noogies.

Even though Vega just might have one of his repeatable abuses toned down, I worry that Dhalsim will suffer a lot in this particular match without his abusive noogie trap. To help him out a little, the upward yoga flame now actually detaches and travels diagonally upward. The short version is almost the same as ST, but the roundhouse version’s flame travels really high up. I know it sounds wonky, but it actually looks really natural (which I chalk up to luck!) I hoped this would help Dhalsim hit those pesky off-the-wall Vegas. but it only barely helps. It can stop some kinds of off-the-wall pressure, but of course isn't helpful if you're getting up right as Vega is diving on top of you.

Conclusion

So where does this leave us? Easier control motions (including easier teleport), but toned down noogie throw trap. Toned down super, but new bigger upflame to slightly help in one of his problem matches. Though Dhalsim has more competition than ever, he’s still a solid character able to keep out, go on offense, and even still go for some cheap throws…just not repeated, nearly irreversible ones.

Cammy is considered one of the five worst characters in Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo (ST) along with Zangief, Blanka, Fei Long, and T.Hawk. It only took a few changes in SF HD Remix to give her a big boost.

Control Motions

Cammy’s hooligan throw motion is one of the most frustrating commands in ST. Not only does it end in up/forward which results in accidental jumping sometimes, but it also closely overlaps the spinning backfist command.

New Commands:

Hooligan Throw: quarter circle forward + punch

Spinning Backfist: quarter circle back + punch

After you do the command for hooligan throw, remember to hold a direction on the joystick and press kick when you’re close to the opponent (and still in the air) to actually throw them.

Just the ability to do Cammy’s hooligan throw reliably makes her easier to win with. It’s a really good move (though most characters can just jab her out of it). Cancelling low forward into Hooligan Throw is now easy and pretty effective. You can catch beginners all day with this throw, and it’s still very effective against experts when you hooligan throw just as they commit to doing a move. Use your good low medium kick to poke and when the opponent pokes back, do your hooligan throw.

Spinning Backfist

Here’s some trivia about the spinning backfist. The very first change I made in all of SF HD Remix was allowing Cammy’s spinning backfist to go through fireballs. All three versions can now do this and she even has lower body invulnerability during this, but her head is completely vulnerable the whole time, so you can smack her with high moves if you know she is going to spinning backfist. Her regular full body vulnerability returns, of course, by the time she lands from her hop.

The spinning backfist now has a much bigger hitbox on the second hit. After several experiments, this was the most effective way to make sure that the move no longer failed to get the built-in two hits. If you hit the opponent with the first hit of this move, it’s now extremely likely that the second hit will also hit and knock down.

If you’re blocking fireballs at full screen and you try to spinning backfist through them, a good Ryu will probably hit you out of it on reaction. What’ more effective though, is when you predict that a fireball is coming and your backfist a little early. In this case, you’ll be safe and often hit Ryu’s hands and knock him down. Another good use of this move is when you’re rushing the opponent down with cannon drills (see below), you can mix in the occasional hooligan throw or jab spinning backfist, using the lower body invulnerability to your advantage.

Cannon Drill

Cammy’s biggest change is that her cannon drills are now much more safe on block. (Trivia: this is the second change I attempted to make in the game, only weeks later did I finally figure out how to do this one.) In ST, cannon drills could be safe on block only from a very particular distance. Now there is much more leeway so with a little knowledge of ranges and which strength to use, you can make this move safe on block every time. Note that as before, it’s very vulnerable at the top so jumping straight up and attacking as you come down is a counter.

Former Evolution world champion Tokido said that Cammy worried him the most of any character. “Too easy” he said. When I asked what he suggested I do, he thought for a while and then said that increasing recovery on cannon drill would make her terrible again, so “maybe it’s ok to have an easy character after all.” A closer look at the move shows that you can actually dragon punch it during several points in that pressure sequence, but it is admittedly hard to hit otherwise. As a result, I lowered the priority in the front of the short version of the cannon drill. The short version is the one you can do repeatedly because after you do it, you’re in a pretty good position to do it again. If you commit to doing just this move, the opponent should now be able to hit you out with the right move.

Cannon Spike: Safe Attack into Safe Attack?

Cammy stayed in the state I described above for a long time. There has been no question that she’s good, it’s just been a question of whether she’s second tier or has creeped into the top. After playing her quite a bit, two things started to bother me, and they both had the same solution. One is that she’s just incredibly good against Zangief and T.Hawk. She can cannon spike anytime she’s within range and force them to block or get hit by her invulnerable move, then she’s completely safe afterwards. It’s abusive, and she doesn’t even need that against them considering her low forward alone is very good against them.

The other problem is that she started to feel a lot like ST Balrog in that she can keep up the pressure (in her case with safe-on-block cannon drills), then do a safe-on-block, invulnerable cannon spike at any time. That is the exact same sequence that was deemed “too good” for Balrog, but now she had it. (In ST, Balrog can do safe low rush punches, then immediately follow with an invulnerable, safe-on-block buffalo headbutt).I felt uncomfortable with this, so now the cannon spike is not completely safe on block. It still bounces her back, but if she does it from too close, T.Hawk is able to counter with an immediate stand roundhouse and Zangief is able to counter with low roundhouse. She can still currently get away with a safe Cannon Spike when she does it from a bit farther though, so we’ll have to keep an eye on this.

Jumping Strong Punch

Cammy was very good against Dhalsim in ST because of one move: jump strong. Dhalsim really had no answer to this move at all. What was a bad match before became a horrendous match in HD Remix. To address this I reduced the size of her hitbox on jumping strong (only towards/away, the straight up version remains the same). The change is microscopic. I think the impact on the game in general is negligible except that tiny change allows Dhalsim's slide to hit her jump strong (well not the jump straight up version, but the jumping toward/away versions). This makes that match a lot closer to even, especially considering Cammy upgrades like spinning backfist going through fireballs.

Conclusion

The invulnerable, always-safe-on-block cannon spike was nice with Cammy, but she’s a more versatile, fair character having a safe-on-block cannon drill instead. I think it’s a fair trade, and she’s still a strong character. The cannon spike is still often safe, so she didn’t even trade that much away. Cammy can now go toe-to-toe in previously very difficult matches against Ken, Ryu, and Sagat (spinning backfist!) and her easier hooligan throw and safe cannon drill allow her to pressure and deal good block damage to the non-fireball characters, too.

In the early years of Super Street Fighter 2 Turobo (ST), most people rated Dee Jay bottom tier, or close to that. Over the years though, both the US and Japanese players discovered that Dee Jay wasn't so bad after all, and that he's perhaps around the middle of the pack. His cross-up medium kick is deadly. His ducking medium kick has extremely high priority and it knocks down. His "Max Out" projectile is solid, his slide is useful, and his up kicks are good at anti-air (short version) and are pretty damaging (roundhouse version).

Only two moves are different for HD Remix Dee Jay: his machine gun upper (charge down, up + punch, then mash punches) and his dread kicks (charge back, forward + kick).

Machine Gun Upper

In ST, this move requires a very precise timing of mashing punches to get all the hits: fast, but not too fast or it won’t work! Two or possibly three people in the United States can actually do this, so I figured it was time to bring machine gun uppers to the people. Now it’s very easy to mash out all the hits on this.

To compensate, the machine gun upper does much less dizzy and damage overall. Cross-up medium kick, low jab x 2, MGU is an easy, good combo though. It does a bit less damage than the slightly harder crossup medium kick, low jab x 2, stand strong, dread kicks combo.

The machine gun upper has a new property, too: it can destroy fireballs! Dee Jay’s best matches are against characters without fireballs, so this is a clever way to help him in matches where he needs help, but not affect matches where he’s already good. Some things you should know about this are that startup of the move cannot destroy fireballs (only the parts that can actually hit) and that every single hit of the move can destroy fireballs.

Most importantly though, you can charge down/back, then go to up/back + punch to perform the MGU while still retaining your charge for a max out projectile. That means when the opponent throws a fireball, you can cancel it with the MGU, then throw back your own projectile faster than you otherwise could have. On paper, this sounds strong, but in practice it’s actually quite a bit of work Dee Jay’s part to eke out a small advantage.

Also, it matters a lot which part of the MGU destroys the fireball. If you see the fireball coming, then destroy it with the MGU, you’re still going to have to go through with the rest of the MGU before you can throw your own max out. It’s a lot more effective if you guess the fireball and do your MGU early so that the very end of it destroys the fireball. That way, you can throw your max out immediately after. But if you’re doing the MGU that early, the opponent can counter by doing nothing or jumping in or throwing a delayed fireball. It’s an interesting guessing game, but during playtest, it was never really dominating.

Dread Kicks

In ST, the time between the two hits of this move is so big that even if you hit with the first hit, the second one hardly ever connects. You can even get dragon punched between these two kicks. In HD Remix, the second kick comes out faster so that it almost always combos. To compensate, each hit does less damage. You can think of it somewhat like Bison’s scissor kick in that it’s a pressure move that does two ticks of block damage.

In ST, the short version of the dread kicks (which hits only once) can go over low attacks. In HD Remix, the medium and roundhouse dread kicks have this same property. This is probably Dee Jay’s biggest upgrade as it makes it pretty scary to try to sweep him or slide at him. Dee Jay already had good pokes, so adding an anti-sweep move is nothing to scoff at. Note to the curious: the medium and roundhouse Dread Kicks do not go over Sagat’s low fireballs, sorry.

Conclusion

Dee Jay gained a few tricks, but stayed close to his roots. For 14 years, he was secretly a very solid character and these upgrades keep him secretly solid in HD Remix.

Fei Long is usually considered one of the five worst characters in the original Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo (ST), but he’s still pretty deadly if he can get close to the opponent and get his offense going. The trouble is, it’s very hard for him to ever get close enough to most characters to get it going. Also, his flying kicks move (aka dragon kicks, aka “chicken wing”) is just too hard for most players (including myself) to physically execute. Unlike the other tiger knee-like moves, the flying kicks required you to start with back on the stick, then go down/back, down, down/forward, forward, up/forward + kick.

Fei Long, Version 1

In HD Remix, Fei Long, along with Akuma, have the notorious distinction of each being the best character in the game and the worst character in the game at various points throughout development. The changelist for HD Remix, version 1 was:

• Flying kick move changed to qcf+k (easy!)• Flying kick with short button can go through fireballs during startup.

The control change immediately made him fun, and being able to do short flying kicks over fireballs easily seemed like just what he needed. Unfortunately, the rest of the cast was just too powerful relative to this. Fei Long seemed like the worst character, or close to it.

Fei Long, Version 2

Then came a ridiculous number of buffs. I was going to make Fei Long viable, damn it!

All three version of Flying Kicks can go through fireballs at startup.

All rekka punches (qcf+p) travel farther.

Super travels much farther, which also makes it safer on block because last hit doesn’t whiff so much

And this ease of use stuff:

Flame kick input window is bigger (easier) and not random.

Medium and roundhouse flame kicks always knock down and can juggle.

Input window for second and third rekka punches longer and not random.

Expert players who played this version said Fei Long was unquestionably #1. His flying kicks were too good at locking opponents down. Like in ST, they can combo in standing fierce, then all three rekka punches. Ouch! His super became the best in the game and you could even juggle with a flame kick afterwards for a total of 90% damage. (Oops!) Also, you could get about 3 supers per round if you tried. You could also juggle flame kicks after flying kicks due to something that seemed at the time like a consequence of putting a juggle property on a move that could catch the enemy on fire and one that couldn’t. It turned out that the ability to juggle with flame kicks after flying kicks wasn’t because of that at all. It was a straight-up bug, but I wouldn’t realize that until months later. Anyway, to top it all off, Fei Long could pretty much ignore fireballs and do the new qcf+k command to go through them on reaction, every time.

Incidentally, a lot of people requested that he be able to cancel his ducking medium kick into rekka punches, but that is really the last thing he needs, as I hope you can see by now. Giving him that would be similar to SF3:3rd Strike Chun Li’s ducking medium kick into super. She can stick it out constantly and if it happens to hit, bam, super. In Fei Long’s case, he wouldn’t even need super meter to deal huge damage off his 3-Rekka series. What we need to do at this point is turn the knobs DOWN on Fei Long. It was useful to see him this powered up state though, because it gave me a frame of reference for what a “too good” and “not good enough” Fei Long look like.

Fei Long, Version 3 (a.k.a version 20)

This is really more like Fei Long version 20 than version 3, but I’m compressing the story for readability. He’s now settled down into seemingly fair state.

Flying kick move changed to qcf+k (easy!)

Flying kick with short button can go through fireballs during startup.

Flying kicks have 5 additional frames of recovery. This prevents you from comboing if you hit, and it also prevents you from trapping people by doing the move repeatedly.

Flying kicks have worse priority air-to-air during the first hit, so it’s easier to counter them with a jumping attack if you predict them.

All version of flame kicks always knock down and can juggle. They can still juggle after you juggle with flying kicks, so have fun, combo-maniacs.

Flame kick input window is bigger (easier) and not random

Rekka punch input window is bigger (easier) and not random

Rekka punches travel a little farther, but not as far as in Version 2

Super travels farther and faster (by a lot) but not as much as Version 2

Super is now vulnerable at Fei Long’s head during 4th and 5th hits

Super meter gains reduced on flame kicks and flying kicks

Super knocks the opponent down too quickly for a flame kick to combo after

The farther reach on Rekka punches allows Fei Long to actually deal some block damage vs a defensive Honda. It also makes it a little easier to pressure a defensive Guile who mostly just sits there and does low forward and the occasional sonic boom. (Both of those matches are still hard for Fei Long though).

The flying kicks are easy to perform now, and still have many uses, but they cannot really be abused like they could in some situations before. The recovery time at the end prevents you from constantly looping flying kicks -> fierce -> flying kicks, etc. I don’t want to give the impression this move is weak though. It still has 14 frames of invulnerable startup, it still juggles and travels in a useful arc, and it’s still an overhead attack (must be blocked high).

The addition of these 5 frames of recovery was very controversial on the forums throughout development, but I never figured out why anyone complained about this. Fei Long is still safe after this move, except if he’s too close versus Zangief or T.Hawk (but you can beat Zangief with just the fierce button anyway, so who cares?). It’s practical to do the flying kicks many times in a round. If you ever hit a jumping opponent, you can juggle with flame kicks. On hit or block against a grounded opponent, you can usually do a flame kick right after and they can’t really do anything about it. The biggest mystery of the entire balancing process was why people saw the new flying kicks as worse, rather than better. They are better overall, despite being worse in some ways.

Going Through Fireballs With Short Flying Kicks

The short flying kick going through fireballs is a help, but not a total solution for getting close. The opponent can still back up and sweep you if he predicts this move. But it’s at least one option to get around fireballs, rather than practically no option, as he had before. At a certain range, you can threaten to go through fireballs on reaction and hit the opponent. There’s little they can do in that situation other than try to fight Fei Long at a different range.

I think it was a real mistake when I let all three versions of this move go through fireballs on startup, because even if it were somehow fair, it goes too far in negating the power of projectiles in Super Turbo. It just felt wrong.

Super

The super move is very useful and a key move for Fei Long now. Its new range helps tremendously. To balance that out, he can no longer get so many per round and if the opponent does predict it and jump over you, he has at least some hope of hitting you back (for example, with Ken’s new longer-reaching Hurricane Kick from behind!).

Version 4 (aka version 25)

Doing a blocked flying kick, then immediately flame kicking was so good (as opposed to worthless, as the forums believed) that it started to feel like a problem. It’s a mindless situation that came up constantly in Fei Long matches. After a flying kick, if he does a short flame kick, it will beat pretty much everything you do, and Fei Long will be safe if you block, so there’s no reason he shouldn’t do it every time.

This just highlighted the problem with any move being invulnerable on startup and safe block. That’s generally a bad idea, and that’s why Cammy’s cannon spike has worse recovery now (but still safe a lot of the time), Balrog’s jab buffalo headbutt has more recovery (but is still safe most of the time), and Ken’s jab dragon punch still has the same vulnerable box on his head that he had in ST (but is still mostly invulnerable). If anything, I gave too light of a touch in trying to remove invulnerable and safe-on-block moves. The touch was also very light on Fei Long, and his short flame kick has more recovery now. At point blank it’s not safe on block, but in most cases it still is.

Toward the end of development, something threatened to ruin Fei Long. We discovered a bug in HD Remix’s juggling system that affected several characters and let them do combos larger than they should be able to. This affected Fei Long the most because fixing it removed his ability to juggle flame kicks after flying kicks. Remember that the all-powerful version 2 Fei Long could do this juggle, and I chose to keep it and tone down everything else because the juggle was fun and he needed something like that to get to the right power level. But now other characters badly needed this bug fixed. What to do?

My solution was to fix the bug for the sake of the other characters, then implement a special case for Fei Long to let him keep those juggles that we balanced him around for months. Most characters have a juggle limit of 3, which is reset if they hit with a super. Fei Long’s juggle limit is now 4. You can do a total of 4 hits, mixing flame kick and flying kick hits however you like. At that point, hitting with the super is still allowed and resets the count as usual, but the last hit of Fei Long’s super triggers a special knock down that ends your combo. Believe me, you want that last clause because things got really out of hand without it.

Conclusion

It was a long road to take Fei Long from the bottom to...wherever he ended up in HD Remix (about middle of the pack in my opinion). He is much more fun now, partly because executing all his moves is easier, and partly because he’s generally juiced up. Longer reaching rekka punches and a longer reaching super give him even more offense, while the new short flying kick gives him a mild new way to get in. Although he lost one difficult combo (flying kicks into fierce into rekkas), he gained a very practical new combo (flying kick juggle into flame kick juggle), giving him good damage dealing potential. He's actually my favorite character in the game, which I didn't expect to happen.

T.Hawk was one of the hardest characters to balance due to his all-or-nothing gameplay in Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo (ST). He usually loses really badly because he just can’t get in. If he does get in--and if you have amazing execution skills--then he can abuse a virtually guaranteed throw loop to win. My overall goals here were to make it easier to get in, but not a guaranteed win if you do. And of course, to make his gameplay accessible to everyone, not just to the two famous Japanese T.Hawk players got 3rd in a major tournament.

Greatest Hits: Normal Moves

Most T.hawk players (if they even exist) play Old T.Hawk in ST. He’s the version that can’t soften throws and doesn’t have a super, but his normal moves are better. The HD Remixed version is kind of a “greatest hits” of T.Hawk’s moves, so he gets to keep his super and his ability to soften throws, and he also gets the better normal attacks from Old T.Hawk. That means his standing roundhouse and standing strong have better hitboxes and are good for poking, and his low roundhouse is faster than ST’s New T.Hawk. He can also cross-up with his jumping splash (down + fierce in the air) and his jumping medium kick.

The Street Fighter trivia experts out there know that T.Hawk’s low strong had a stray vulnerable box that allowed him to get hit from really far away during that move’s recovery. Yes, I fixed that, too. ;)

Greatest Hits: Dragon Punch, Now Knocks Down Properly

His dragon punch priority is also the (better) Old T.Hawk version, and the timing is more lenient (as it is for all dragon punches in the game). T.Hawk’s fierce dragon punch often did not knock down before as part of a game-wide problem where 2-hit moves are tagged to only knock down on the second hit. I fixed this by making both hits knock down and the first hit juggles into the second.

360 Command Throw

More exciting than these normal moves and dragon punches, the 360 command has changed. You can still do the old 360 command if you like, but the special throw will also come out with the new motion that doesn’t require holding up on the joystick/d-pad. The motion is half circle back, then forward + punch or half circle forward, then back + punch. It’s even more lenient in that you can start from defensive or offensive crouch if you like, instead of straight left or right. And finally, you can even replace the final left or right input with any of the three up inputs if you really want. If all that sounds complicated, just remember this: half circle back, then forward + punch is the main way to do it and doesn’t make you accidentally jump.

This change alone breathes new life into T.Hawk. His 360 was incredibly hard to do in ST because T.Hawk, unlike Zangief, jumps in only 3 frames. That means that when you’re doing a 360 motion in ST, as soon as you reach up/back, you have only 3 more 60ths of a second before T.Hawk will jump, and you have to complete the command throw before then. The new command eliminates that problem entirely. The emphasis is much more on should you do the throw, rather than can you do it.

Super

The 720 motion is also much easier. It’s either half circle back x 2, then forward + punch, or half circle forward x 2, then back + punch. Yes, that means you can walk up and do a super throw without jumping. This is potentially devastating, but remember that if the opponent has less than one third of his health, you could beat him anyway with the non-super throw. For the super to really matter, you have to have full super meter and the opponent has to have more than 1/3rd of his life, and you have to get into a situation where you can do a command throw, have time to do it, and you have to successfully pull off the super.

Hawk Dive

And the biggest change: T.Hawk’s aerial dive is now SAFE on block. Incidentally, it can also be done with jab + short or strong + forward or fierce + roundhouse, in addition to the original command of jab+strong+fierce. The new command is for gamepad players, but the SAFE ON BLOCK property is a huge balance change that will strike terror into all our hearts for years to come.

After the hawk dive, T.Hawk falls mostly straight down rather than bouncing back. This is a great tool for getting in. The bounce still puts him too far away to get a command throw, so you’re not literally “in” yet, you’re just “almost in.” You end up at a distance where you’re close enough to dragon punch if the opponent sticks something out, but he could block and punish you if he guesses that. You could also walk up and try for a command throw, but you’re really too far to just walk up, so the opponent can counter that with sweeps pretty easily.

Specifically, Guile can block the dive, then low forward kick. If T.Hawk decides to walk up, he will always get hit by low forward. If T.Hawk decides to dragon punch when he lands, it will whiff vs the low forward (because of angles of the hitboxes) and Guile can punish him afterwards. If T.Hawk jumps in after the dive or jumps and dives again, Guile has time to retract his low forward and flash kick on reaction. Guile has plenty of answers here.

I first thought Dhalsim would have no chance against this amazing dive, because he always relied on hitting it back with standing roundhouse. I soon realized Dhalsim can jump back, then drill the dive. He can standing jab to hit the dive cleanly every time. He can medium slide under the dive to make it miss then hit back with far standing strong. That’s three answers right there, it’s just that he no longer has the universal answer of always block, then stand roundhouse.

Blanka is also able to beat this dive without too much trouble. His jumping straight up roundhouse has a good angle to either hit the dive, or even come down and do a combo if the spacing is right. He can use electricity (which is easier to do now) to hit the dive cleanly, too. Bison can use similar techniques with jump straight up roundhouse or jump towards strong punch. T.Hawk still hangs in the air just a bit before diving, and it’s often just the right height for Bison to do his juggling jump strongs.

More Hawk Dive

Early on in development, the hawk dive knocked down, just like it did in ST. This was one of the very few times during all of playtesting when someone really scared me enough with a move that it actually made me change it. This time, it was Campbell “Buktooth” Tran. His strategy was to mostly dive because it’s safe on block, and if he ever happened to hit, the knockdown let him go for cross-up splash, jabs or shorts, then 360 command throw. ST T.Hawk didn’t land close enough to get the cross-up splash, even though his dive knocked down.

Buktooth was able to do well against me with this strategy while he was on the phone, arranging travel logistics with his friends for later that night. This showed that the risk/rewards were so skewed here that the game barely required his attention. I made the dive not knock down.

Here’s a summary of the changes that followed:

Hawk Dive no longer knocks down. The reward for hitting was simply too great for the low risk.

Hawk Dive now falls slower after hit/block so that on block, T.Hawk does not recover before the opponent anymore.

Hawk Dive now falls even slower after hit/block to prevent Hawk Dive -> low short or forward combo that was possible at a very certain height/distance. Difficult to perform, but too powerful.

After command throw and super, T.Hawk now bounces farther away, and falls slower during the bounce. This prevents safe jump jab in the corner after a command throw, but still barely allows walk up low jab after a command throw (remember, the victim can hit your low jab with a reversal, but not the safe jump jab).

Hawk Dive damage reduced.

Hawk Dive startup time increased 4 frames.

Alternate Hawk Dive added. New dive has incredibly fast startup, knocks down on hit, but is unsafe on block against many characters. Purpose is to allow T.Hawk to deal block damage to defensive characters such as Guile and also to give him back his knockdown dive if he’s willing to do the unsafe version.

Both hits of low roundhouse given the ability to deal block damage (mostly to help vs. Honda).

Change reverted: block damage removed on low roundhouse.

Change reverted: Alternate Hawk Dive removed, the ultra fast startup wasn’t quite game-breaking in tests, but I can imagine it would be once released into the wild.

Change reverted: Hawk Dive’s damage set back to original game’s, entirely because block damage turns out to be linked to hit damage. Reducing the damage in an earlier change had the unintended effect of reducing the block damage also, so change reverted because he needs a way to deal some blocked damage.

Change reverted: T.Hawk no longer bounces farther away after his 360 command throw, now that he has a throw whiff to weaken the safe-jump trap.

The Inescapable Throw Loop From ST

I’ll explain what was going on with the changes in that list for T.Hawk’s 360 command throw. In, ST, he could do this devastating sequence:

Safe jump jab -> low jab -> button-up command throw -> repeat.

That’s a lot of jargon, so let’s sort it out. I covered the concept of safe jumps in the advanced section of my SSF2T tutorial videos. The idea is that you jump at your knocked-down opponent as he gets up. You time your jump so that you land just a couple frames after the opponent is completely standing up. If the opponent chooses to do a reversal attack (such as Ryu’s dragon punch or Guile’s flash kick) then it actually won’t hit you. Those reversal attacks have a few frames at the beginning where you can’t hit them, but they can’t hit you either. So your jumping jab will pass through the opponent, then you’ll land (and block), then their reversal attack will start to hit—but you’ll be safe. Yes it’s hard to time this, but experts can do it.

If the opponent tries to do a reversal attack in this situation, you’ll just land, block it, and then be able to retaliate with a command throw. If the opponent decides to block, then your jab will touch him, forcing him to block. If blocks the jumping jab, he will be forced to block your subsequent ducking jab. At this point, you can perform the 360 on the joystick, then release a punch button. In Street Fighter, releasing a button (as opposed to pressing it) does count for doing a special move, but it does not cause you to do a normal move. So after the opponent blocks your low jab, if he does a move that makes him unthrowable (such as a dragon punch), then your throw will fail. In ST, T.Hawk does not have a throw whiff animation, so usually if you miss a throw, you get a normal punch instead. But if you tried to do the command throw by releasing a punch button (rather than pressing it) you don’t even get a punch if you fail to throw—you just get nothing, and you can block.

So after the opponent blocks your low jab, he will either get thrown or you will safely block his reversal attack (and then throw him anyway). At this point, you can safe jump jab to repeat the entire sequence if you are in the corner.

The bottom line is that although this loop is very difficult to execute properly, if you land it and you can execute it, you basically win. It also means there is a “perfect T.Hawk algorithm” once you get in the right situation. No real strategy is involved, it’s just a very difficult test of your ability to execute precisely. You could say that T.Hawk “needs” something this powerful, because even with it, he’s still bottom tier. But when we buff him up, it’s probably a bad idea to let him keep this. Because getting in is easier now (safe hawk dive), the reward should not be so great, and more importantly, the strategy should not be completely replaced by a dexterity test once you do get in.

Removing the Loop

My first attempt to fix this was to add bounce back after his 360 command throw, so that he could not safe jump afterwards. I could write a whole article on just that, because it was extremely difficult to make that actually work, but I eventually did. Much later, I finally got the time I needed from a programmer to implement a throw whiff for T.Hawk that operated just like Zangief’s. This means that if T.Hawk attempts the button-up method for his loop, the opponent can dragon punch him. (With the whiff, T.Hawk would safely block in this case, then throw you anyway).

For months, he had both of these penalties--more bounce back after the throw and a throw whiff when he missed. It just seemed like too much. Some players started asking why he really needed both penalties when either one prevented the inescapable loop. Eventually, I agreed and reverted the bounce back after the command throw to be the same as in ST, but kept the new whiff animation.

Other Problems

T.Hawk had so much trouble beating Honda and Guile I tried all sorts of things, like alternate versions of the hawk dive and block damage on his roundhouse, as you can see in the bullet point list above. I don’t think any of these things really worked out. Some had technical problems, some caused more balance problems in other areas, and some just felt strange. In the end, I reverted lots of that stuff. Instead, I just “tried harder” to win the matches against Guile and Honda and I was able to develop some techniques. These fights are hard, but I think they are winnable.

Conclusion

You might argue that T.Hawk is even worse now than the original game because the deadly throw loop has been removed (throw whiff means it’s escapable now). But the flipside is that T.Hawk doesn’t have to be all-or-nothing anymore. He can mostly get in with the new dive, so getting in doesn’t need to lead to instant checkmate. I do wish we had been able to give him a new way to get in (such as a much sped up version of his hopping punch special move from Street Fighter Alpha 3).

He does have trouble against defensive characters like Guile and Honda, but these matches are more winnable than before. In other matches, he’s more well-rounded. His gameplay is more “interactive” now and less based on perfectly executing a throw loop, so this makes fighting him more fun for a wider set of players, and I'm happy with that.

Balrog is generally considered to be tied for the best character in Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo (ST). Pretty much everyone ranks Balrog and Dhalsim as top, with some Americans adding in Old Sagat, some Japanese adding in Vega, and a few people claiming Chun Li. But there’s not much debate about Balrog (or Dhalsim) being top.

The knee-jerk reaction is to nerf, nerf, nerf (that’s internet-speak for “reducing the power level” of something). I want to leave the top characters top, so it’s been quite a test of willpower to avoid bringing down the hammer on Balrog.

Before you read the actual nerfs, I’d like you to consider what might have happened. By far the most common suggestion for Balrog was to reduce his overall damage by about 20%. Almost everyone who said anything about Balrog said this. But reducing the overall damage of a character by 20% is mostly just another way of making him 20% worse, and does nothing to remove the tactics we’d like to tone down. So the good news for Balrog players is that he still does a whole lot of damage and is not a 20% worse Balrog.

Throw Loops

After Balrog’s headbutt hold, he can do a mixup where he either walks under the opponent (to get on the other side) or not walk under and say on the same side. He can threaten to do a low roundhouse from either side, resulting in a knockdown. This part is fine. He can also do a low forward or low strong and then attempt another throw, resulting in a loop. This part is too abuseable.

As with Ken, it was a tough decision, but I think it’s more fun if Balrog gets to keep his mixup, yet loses the power of a repeatable loop. His low strong, throw, low strong, throw sequence could be done from literally so far away that some characters cannot counter throw. The change is that Balrog’s throw range is now shorter, and the first hit of the hold does less damage. The walk-under tricks still work, as do the throw tricks after whiffing a short dashing punch, but if you want to attempt a throw loop, you a) have to be close enough that your opponent might counterthrow and b) deal less damage when you successfully do it. Balrog’s relentless offense is so good that a slightly worse throw game should leave him plenty powerful.

Safe Attack, Safe Attack

Another problem with Balrog is this sequence: low rushing punch, then jab headbutt. The low rushing punch is fast, damaging, must be blocked low, and is safe on block. The command for the move leaves him charged to immediately do a Buffalo Headbutt. So not only can you not hit back the low rushing punch on block, but if you even try, you will probably get hit by the headbutt (it’s an invulnerable startup move, somewhat like a Dragon Punch). If you block the headbutt, it too is safe on block. And to make matters worse, he gets a huge amount of super meter for doing that sequence. And to make matters worse than that, he has the best super move in the game. Something has to give!

I thought for a very long time about removing the ability to charge for a headbutt right after a low rushing punch (or some method of making sure you couldn’t do those two moves right in a row). In the end, I have to say that the fun-factor of that sequence is good, and the problem is the safe-on-block jab headbutt. This feeling was corroborated when I asked multiple-time tournament champion and Balrog player Graham Wolfe what the most abuseable Balrog thing is. His answer, “Safe jab headbutt…and Daigo said so too.” (Note to Daigo: If you never really said that, I hold Graham Wolfe responsible!).

Damn it

The jab headbutt now has more recovery and can sometimes be hit back on block. It actually ended up not that much different from ST though. This is my biggest regret in all the balance decisions: this needed to be nerfed way, way more. Balrog just doesn't deserve to have the safest reversal in the game. Oh well.

The strong headbutt also has barely worse recovery (and can now go through fireballs), but the fierce headbutt is not changed. All three headbutts also generate less super meter, and the first few levels of the turnaround punch also generate less super meter. Note that all the rushing punches generate just as much super meter as ever though. So when you do low rushes (Balrog’s bread and butter), you have the same priority, same speed, same damage, and same super meter gains as ever.

Super

Balrog’s super is probably the best in the game in ST. It’s high priority, full screen range, goes through fireballs, and is safe on block almost all the time (except notably against Zangief). In HD Remix, I tinkered with it several times to make it worse in various ways, but in the end I reverted all those changes except one: it now does about 50% damage rather than 60%, putting it in line with most other supers in the game in HD Remix.

Turn Around Punch

To be consistent with the rest of the game, this move can now be performed by pressing and releasing just two punches or two kicks, rather than three. I don’t want to allow Balrog to access fierce and roundhouse while he charges turn punches though, so here’s how that works. While you are holding two punches (or two kicks) to charge the turn around punch, you CAN press the third punch (or kick) and get it to work. But once you’ve held the buttons long enough that you’re actually charged for a turn around punch, pressing the third button will do nothing at all.

You don’t really need to grasp that though. The point is that you can either do the move the same way as always with three buttons, or just use two, but no one can really exploit this by charging up a final-punch while doing fierces and roundhouses at the same time.

The New Move That Didn't Happen

Every character in the game got at least something in HD Remix. I gave Dhalsim a mostly-useless new upflame (and made the control motion easier to do) as way of giving him something, even though he is such a top character. For Balrog, at one point I planned a "cross-counter" move like Dudley's in Street Fighter 3. This would make him totally vulnerable to low attacks or throws, but if you hit him out of it any other way, he automatically attacks you. Another idea was to make the turn around punch with the kick buttons have different properies. I thought about making it so holding the kick buttons would immediately make it so Balrog did his (vulnerable) turn around pose, as opposed releaseing the buttons triggering that. So holding the kick buttons has the drawback of locking you in place, but has some advantage such as giving you a higher level turn around punch than you'd usually get for how long you charged.

Anyway, I didn't get a chance to implement these for schedule reasons. You might wonder how that's possible because the game was delayed so long because of the art, the programmer who would have been able to implement those things was put on another project, so I had no resources to make it happen. And even if I did have the resources, I'm not sure if it would have panned out anyway because those ideas are fairly powerful and Balrog is very good already. You'll have to settle for the top character being mostly the same as last time around.

Conclusion

In closing, Balrog remains incredibly powerful. His throw game is barely weaker, but his throw tricks are still intact. His ability to generate super is a little worse, but the power of his super is still intact. His general ability to rush you down is also intact, as is his high damage. I knew he'd remain top tier, though I still wish his jab headbutt were less safe so he wouldn't be quite so dominating. Even a slightly nerfed Balrog still strikes fear in everyone's hearts!

Vega is sometimes considered top tier in Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo (ST), or at least in the top of the 2nd tier. He’s fast, has many good pokes, a good slide, and his off-the-wall attack is versatile and powerful. In keeping with the design philosophy of HD Remix, Vega is only barely weaker now, and he has harder competition all around from other characters.

The Wall Dive

Vega’s wall dive no longer knocks down. In ST, after you get knocked down by the wall dive, Vega can do it again as you get up and force you do block a tricky cross-up. If you get hit again, he can do it again, and so on. Vega is actually perfectly capable of winning without this abusive, repeatable tactic, so losing it isn’t crippling.

Note that if Vega hits you out of the air with the wall dive, of course you will be knocked down (same as any air-to-air attack). And his izuna drop (throw) from his wall dive still knocks down, so if you get hit by either of those things, he can threaten one more wall dive as you get up, but even if that hits, you’ll be able to stop his next attempt much more easily.

While it is possible to combo a low strong after you hit with a wall dive now (because the dive doesn’t knock down), it’s position-dependent. You usually end up hitting a little to high with the wall dive to actually combo a followup, but with good timing, you can. I didn't specifically intend this combo to work, but adding more delay at the end of the wall dive would mean you could hit back Vega too often, even when he hits you. Overall, I think it's much preferable to fight against a Vega who sometimes gets an extra hit of low strong, rather than a Vega that traps you in a knockdown loop.

Note that years after Street Fighter HD Remix's release, some of the biggest tournaments in the US for ST have come down to Vega's repeated knockdown wall dives, including Evolution 2013 and two different tournaments at Evolution 2014.

Flip Kick

n ST, Vega can “store” his flip kick command. First, charge down/back, then hold back. You can hold back as long as you like and you can still do the flip kick by taping forward+kick. It’s so hard for some characters to actually get close to Vega, that he really doesn’t need what amounts to a (Guile) flash kick anti-air while walking backwards. A couple Japanese top players as well as several Americans all requested that this be removed, so it is. The only command for Vega’s flip kick attack is now charge down/back, then forward + kick. I personally never even used this technique, and really don't think he needed it to win.

Fake Wall Dive

Vega does get one new toy to play with: the fake wall dive. First, execute the wall dive (charge down, up + kick), and after Vega touches the wall, press kick again. Vega will hang for a moment, then drop directly down. This is marginally useful in avoiding Ken’s fierce dragon punch or Blanka’s vertical roll.

An earlier version of the fake wall dive allowed Vega to slightly steer whether he dropped forward or away (rather than just straight down) and it dropped down something like three times as fast as it does now. After some players complained that it was too powerful in a playtest, I gave my usual response of asking for someone to beat me with it, or at least make me afraid of it. I chose Ryu and took on all comers, which included many well-known Evolution tournament players. No one beat me one single game with their Vega. In fact, no one beat me even a single round. I was not remotely afraid of the fake wall dive. I’m not telling you this as a form of bragging, I’m just letting you know how balancing happens.

Why was I not afraid? Because doing repeated fake wall dives left my opponents with no real advantage over just sitting there and doing nothing. Yes it’s tricky in that you never know which wall dive will have teeth and which will be fake, but I mostly ignored it and jump roundhoused (or air hurricane kicked) at them anyway.

And yet one thing they demonstrated was important. James Chen showed that in ST with Vega vs. Cammy, if Vega does blocked low jab, cancels into off-the-wall (opposite wall) then holds back to stay away, Cammy can still cannon spike him. In other words, he cannot use the wall dive to turn his low jab into a safe runaway tool in ST. But the same setup in HD Remix with the fake wall dive did allow him to be safe vs. the cannon spike. Even though no one demonstrated anything in real gameplay, the mere potential for more Vega runaway was enough to show that we needed to weaken the move.

It turns out, the move had to be slowed down significantly to prevent it from being completely safe in the sort of situation I explained above. Since then, I’ve seen no one able to run away with the fake wall dive, but it can occasional trick the opponent into attacking at the wrong time, so it seems about right.

Vega’s Competition

A few top players have wondered if Vega is too strong, even still. Time will tell of course, but he does seem about right to me. His most abusive tactic is weakened, and he has a (kind of slow) fake wall dive in return. But what’s much more relevant is the field of characters he must now face.

Zangief is more able to fight him than ever. Guile used to have no real answer to Vega repeatedly sliding. (I wonder if anyone has any tournament matches of me doing something like 12 slides in a row vs. Choi’s or Jeron’s Guile in tournaments.) But now Guile has 2 answers: roundhouse flash kick and the new overhead. Cammy, Fei Long, and T.Hawk all got huge boosts and are just more threatening overall to Vega and to everyone else.

That said, Vega is still Vega. His speed, range, and wall dive keep him in the game, but he should be less dominant than in ST due to his adversaries being more equipped to fight him than before.

Sagat—well actually “Old Sagat”—is one of the best characters in Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo (ST). He’s even soft-banned in Japan, meaning there’s a tacit agreement not to play him, even though you are technically allowed. He might not be as strong of a character as Balrog or Dhalsim overall, but the problem is that there are several matches where he just dominates. His tiger shots (fireballs) are so powerful that many characters spend the entire game trying to get around them. I think everyone knew that this nerf was coming.

Tiger Shots

Sagat now has fireball recovery that’s better than New Sagat and worse than Old Sagat. In ST, the difference in recovery times was about 12 frames between Old and New (huge), and Remixed Sagat’s recovery is about 4 frames worse than the terror that was Old Sagat. It’s still very good, but not as abuseable. It’s similar to Ryu’s fireball recovery.

Various Boosts

In exchange for this loss, Sagat has several new bonuses. First, he is based on ST’s New Sagat, so he now is able to soften throws and he has a super move (with the reversal bug fixed, even). Furthermore, the super travels farther than in ST and it always knocks down on hit. It’s now a viable tool. He also has ST New Sagat’s ability to cross-up with medium kick. This gives him a way to apply some up-close pressure.

Remixed Sagat has Old Sagat’s fierce tiger uppercut, meaning it hits only once for good damage rather than juggling five times for low damage. The five hit juggle can be fun, but one-hit version is just more effective in most situations. As with all dragon punch motions, the tiger uppercut has a more lenient (non-random) input timing window.

Tiger Knee

Finally, his tiger knee is now performed with a dragon punch motion, it always knocks down on hit, and (as a result of that) it can juggle for three hits. Usually this means if he hits with tiger knee, he can do one more because either the first or second knee will get 2 hits. This is good damage and it pushes the opponent back into the corner. I reduced the tiger knee’s damage and dizzy power because of this juggle.

I didn’t really intend this juggle to exist in the first place, it was just a consequence of fixing the 2-hit moves that don’t knock down when they should. I did this very early in development and the tiger knee juggle seemed fun, so I kept it and balanced Sagat around having this.

Although the knee doesn’t have any better frame stats or hitboxes than before, several playtesters said “Wow, is that higher priority now?” when they play against it. I think the ability to walk forward and do it because of the dragon punch command, coupled with the usefulness of scoring a knockdown even on a glancing blow makes it a much more useful tool. And no, you can’t juggle with a super after a tiger knee unless you’re making a combo video.

Normal Move Cancels

Old Sagat could cancel his stand short, stand forward, and stand strong into special moves, while ST’s New Sagat could not cancel any of those. (Well, he could only cancel the first hit of stand short and stand forward, not the second hits.) Remixed Sagat cannot cancel the second hit of standing forward because that was only used for combos anyway, and the ability to juggle with tiger knees is good enough already! He also cannot cancel the second hit of standing short, which is a somewhat controversial decision. In ST, this is mainly used in the following strategy:

If the enemy gets near, they deserve their chance at Sagat without having to block a very far stand short cancelled into another Tiger Shot. Remixed Sagat can, however, cancel his standing strong into special moves. This is mainly useful against Dhalsim and Balrog, which is fine, and Zangief. (Those characters can't crouch under that move.)

Conclusion

Playtesers said that playing against my Remixed Sagat was actually fun. I think this was because standing in place and doing nothing but tiger shots wasn’t as effective, and the lack of a cancellable stand far standing short makes it even harder to keep up the old iron defense. In HD Remix, it’s better to mix in tiger knees, cross-ups, supers, and even jump ins, so it feels like more is going on when you fight Sagat. Lots more.

Despite his slightly slower fireball recovery and loss of stand short cancel, Sagat is still very strong, just not dominating like before. Plus, more characters now have more options against fireballs, such as Cammy’s spinning backfist, Blanka’s faster “rainbow roll,” Fei Long’s short flying kicks, Dee Jay’s machine gun upper, and Honda’s jab headbutt. Sagat managed to go to one of the most boring characters (to me) to one of the characters I have the most fun playing.

Bison always seemed strong in Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo (ST) because he can suddenly win matches out of nowhere, and he can keep up the pressure against most characters...if he can get things going his way. If he lands a solid jumping roundhouse, he can combo into low forward, then psycho crusher for a dizzy, then follow up with another combo for the win. If he lands a cross-up attack, he can do a different (admittedly difficult) kill-combo. His standing kicks and scissor kicks let him keep up the pressure.

But Bison can’t always put that offense together. Getting out of Ryu’s fireball trap in the corner once it starts is extremely hard. Even getting near Old Sagat is extremely hard. And Honda has a huge advantage over Bison because Bison has no way out of repeated Ochio throws other than his super. In short, Bison lacks defense. He’s the only character in the game with no special move that can be used as a reversal. Even Dhalsim has a teleport to get out of trouble.

I always liked Bison’s character design though. In theory, a character who is all offense and no defense is an interesting addition to the game. In practice, he just has too many matches of disadvantage and he’s not used that often in tournaments. He’s not even considered a second tier character. What to do about it?

Suggestions

A few people suggested that his psycho crusher become a reversal attack (some invulnerability and/or active hitting frames at the start of the move). This is way too powerful and mostly just turns him into Honda. The most common suggestion was to make the headstomp a reversal that can go through fireballs. Even this is too powerful because it means an attempted fireball trap against Bison leads to Bison getting guaranteed damage (the headstomp is fast and would hit fireball throwers during their recovery). Yet another common suggestion was to give Bison a teleport because he has that move in later games. This would allow him to escape from trouble, but not get any free damage. Even that is too strong, in my opinion. Yes he needs a way to get out of trouble, but it should not lead to guaranteed damage and it should put Bison at some risk.

Reversal Devil’s Reverse

The devil’s reverse is that move that hardly anyone uses where you charge down, then up + punch. It makes you leap into the air, then you can press punch again to fly around with your blue fiery arm extended. In HD Remix, this move now has a few invulnerable frames on startup. Bison can use it to escape a fireball trap, but he’s also committing to a devil’s reverse, and gets no guaranteed damage. He can try to reset the situation with this move.

A couple notes about the new Devil’s Reverse. Bison is as vulnerable as ever as he leaves the ground, so you can jump kick him as he leaves the ground to stop him. Ryu can actually still keep up a trap against Bison by alternating fireballs and then jump roundhousing (or jumping strong for juggles) when expects Bison to try to Devil’s Reverse out. This is preferable to the situation in ST though, because it requires both players to make careful decisions, as opposed to the fireball trap just winning flat-out.

In fact, it can’t escape jumping attacks very well at all. Earlier versions in development did allow Bison to avoid cross-up combos most of the time, but this was really never supposed to the be reason for changes to the devil’s reverse. I rolled back the invulnerability to be about as little as possible while still allowing him to escape fireball traps with it.

For many months of development in HD Remix, the devil’s reverse put the opponent into a juggle state if it actually hit. That means you could follow up with two jumping strongs and then nick them with one hit of a super if you have super meter. On the one hand, no one should really get hit by devil’s reverse because it’s enormously telegraphed. On the other hand, the entire sequence (with super) did more than 40% damage, and it was just uncomfortably much. You’ll have to live without this one.

Fake Slide

Bison also has a new move: the fake slide. His regular slide from ST is unchanged, and you can still hold down/back to charge up as you (regular) slide up to your knocked-down opponent (a common Bison maneuver). The command for the new fake slide is hold diagonally down/forward and press roundhouse. This means you are charged for a headstomp or devil’s reverse, but you lose your charge for psycho crushers and scissor kicks when you fake slide. I actually originally wanted the fake slide to be performed by holding the roundhouse button down for X frames when you slide, which would have allowed him to keep all four special moves charged. We had technical difficulties with this, but maybe it’s for the best, because the move is good enough as it is.

Why have a fake slide at all? Bison is about offense, so here is one more offensive tool. This move isn’t really intended to change his position in the rankings though. I don’t think it allows him to beat characters he couldn’t beat without the slide. It’s more to reinforce what Bison is about. When you pressure the opponent with standing forward and standing roundhouse, you are also at just the right range to fake slide, then throw. The fake slide recovers much more quickly than the real slide, travels a shorter distance, and it does not put the enemy into blockstun because it can’t hit at all. It’s just a way to travel quickly (and then usually throw!).

I actually call this one of Bison’s “circus tricks,” meaning it’s something you can randomly throw into an attack pattern and hope for the best. Though it’s not a super-solid lock down (it can’t even hit!), it will catch people off guard and we already know people will call you cheap when you use it to throw. It should be great fun.

Miscellaneous: Jump up Strong and Stand Jab

Two other odds and ends. In ST, Bison’s jumping strong punch can air juggle for 3-hits. This is true for his jumping toward and jumping away punches with strong, but not true for his jumping straight up strong. This always seemed like an oversight to me, because his fist has that same blue fiery graphics during the jump straight up version. Now the jumping straight up strong punch has the same ability to juggle.

Finally, Bison’s standing jab is slightly higher priority. This does not give him any extra air defense (the new anti-fireball startup of the devil’s reverse is quite enough defense for him). The purpose of this change is to let his standing jabs reliably hit Honda’s torpedo and Blanka’s roll. Bison has trouble against Honda, so any tiny advantage like that helps. Besides, Balrog’s standing jab beats both of those special moves easily, every time, and it really looks like’s Bison’s should, too. I just extended the hitbox slightly so that you can now jab incoming Honda torpedos and Blanka balls.

Conclusion

The new Bison can still practically kill you with a solid hit, if he ever gets one. He can still perform various “circus tricks” such as randomly jumping around with strong, or headstomping, and now we can add fake sliding and devil’s reversing to the list. He now has at least some way to attempt to get out of lockdown traps, but not without risk. In HD Remix, he feels like even more of a pressure character (yay for fake slide), and a slippery fish when he’s forced into devil’s reversing on defense.

Akuma is so powerful in Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo (ST) that he's banned in all US tournaments. I’ve noticed that when players of other games read about this, they think that is some kind of hypocrisy to the general theory that we should ban as little as we possibly can. But Akuma is not like whoever the best character is in whatever other game you play. He’s not just the best, but he’s miles and miles and miles above the rest of the cast. He was never intended to be fairly balanced in ST, and it shows.

In HD Remix, Akuma was our chance to get a 17th playable character. By taking him down several notches to make him fair for tournament play, we get 17 new matchups in the game. I even put him on the character select screen so you don’t have to do a code to pick him. In a nod to his fake-secrecy though, he’s “hidden” above Honda’s selection box.

Bugs That Ruined Akuma

Unfortunately, things didn't work out. It's true that HD Remix Akuma is WAY WAY weaker than ST Akuma, but he's still too good. He has a game-breaking bug and must be banned for that reason alone. The bug is that he makes an opponent block an air fireball, if he lands and does his Raging Demon super while they're still in blockstun, the opponent has only a 25% chance to jump out. Yes, it's really a random chance and it's really that exact chance. This is very easy to setup and it was never intended. We specifically coded it so that you CAN jump out if you're in hitstun, but we didn't catch the blockstun bug before release.

There are a few other bugs as well. ST Akuma's red fireball has completely invulnerable, unthrowable startup. ST Akuma's dragon punches have 0 frames of startup (hit on the first frame so they can't be safe jumped against). HD Remix Akuma retains both of those powerful properties, but he wasn't supposed to. Finally, the hit box on his air fireball, though the same as ST Akuma's, is accidentally too big in the zone behind the fireball. This makes it more difficult for characters like Honda to torpedo under it than it should.

All these bugs are very easy to fix and really unfortunate we never got the chance. The tournament players who tested him did not know of or abuse those bugs, they knew of plenty other properties about him and did not even rate him as top tier during or even shortly after release. The point being that he would have been a fair character if not for those bugs.

What follows is a description of all the work that went into balancing him before release.

Air Fireball

Akuma has a lot of completely unfair things, but the air fireball is the main one. Most characters just can’t deal with it at all. My first idea was kind of an experiment. What if the air fireball was the only non-super move in the game that used up super meter, rather than gave super meter? Let him keep the unfairness of the move, but limit its use. The idea is sort of like an EX move from other Capcom fighting games.

I thought of this version of the move kind of like Millia’s hairpin in the fighting game Guilty Gear. In that game, Millia wants to rush you down. She has a hairpin move that has a similar trajectory to ST Akuma’s air fireball. Hers travels insanely fast though, and forces the opponent to block while she uses that time to get in. The catch is that she then has to pick up the Hairpin to do it again, so she can’t keep doing it over and over in a row. ST Akuma’s fireball is so hard to deal with that I thought allowing even a few of them would be pretty powerful because it would allow him to teleport or crossup or whatever other tricks he felt like. I tried making the move cost 25% super meter, but the air fireball itself was just as strong as ever.

Odds and Ends

There was a bunch of other stuff to fix up:

Akuma’s ducking kicks no longer have invulnerable legs(!)

Akuma can now be dizzied like any other character

Akuma’s Hurricane Kicks don’t have invulnerable startup and can’t hit on the way up

Raging Demon super tuned to go slower than the secret version of him on Dreamcast, but travel farther

Teleport no longer has random input window and can be done with 2 punches or 2 kicks rather than 3 punches and 3 kicks (drawback: can't use "piano method" for Dragon Punch)

Teleport has vulnerability in the head so he can’t run away forever with it, and it builds no super meter.

Stray hitbox that was floating in the air on his medium kick is fixed

Akuma takes more damage than other characters

Red fireball recovery made way worse so it can’t do inescapable lockdown

Blue fireball startup and recovery made closer to Ryu’s

Knockback effect on his fierce blue fireball only happens from very close range

Timing on Raging Demon command much more lenient

All of this definitely brought him down to Earth. He wasn’t overpowered anymore, but all the fun was balanced out of him too. More testing revealed that he was probably the worst character in the game.

Air Fireball, Take 2

The air fireball is Akuma’s signature special move, yet he could hardly even do it because of the meter restriction. That was a failed experiment. Next, we tried to make an air fireball that he could use as much as he wanted, like any special move, but that was somehow fair. It needed a much more downward angle for starters. The problem is that even when the angle was right, he could do really nasty lockdowns with repeated air fireballs. Making the fireballs travel faster or slower didn’t help at all. All it did was change the way he did the nasty lockdown.

The real trick to making that move work is the slight upward hop we added as he releases the fireball. This increases the time between two consecutive air fireballs, and it’s what lets opponents actually get out of any traps he might do. It took about 5 or 6 tries of tuning this move, but suddenly it clicked and seemed right.

At this point, I also added back in his hurricane kick’s ability to hit on the way up, so that it can hit ducking opponents and lead to a juggle. I also toned down his damage penalty so he didn’t take quite as much as before.

This version of Akuma was pretty good. It was definitely more fun to be able to do the air fireball more and try to set up tricks with it. A few months past and I started to think that Akuma was still the worst in the game, though. He has no super fireball like Ryu, no overhead, and no fake fireball. Akuma had some advantages, but just not enough to really justify picking him.

Version 3 Akuma

Then I made one small change that made a world of difference. I allowed his air fireball to be performed very low to the ground. In the original game, it has a minimum jump distance before it can come out, but I removed this. Now it became possible to do a “tiger knee” air fireball, meaning you roll the joystick from down to forward to up/forward (for a jump), then wait a moment for Akuma to barely leave the ground, then press punch to get an immediate air fireball. This turned out to be way more fun and versatile than I realized it would be.

Akuma can attempt many, many traps and setups with this. An example is immediate air fireball (I’ll call it TK air fireball, referencing the tiger knee motion), then land right next to the opponent with the cover of the air fireball. Then do, say, low strong, TK air fireball and land right next to them again. Then do low strong, low strong (pushes you farther away), and TK air fireball to reset the trap. This time, after you do a normal move or two, jump straight up and do an air fireball.

I just listed three different air fireball situations there: one TK from close, one TK from farther, and one where you jump straight up and don't do the tiger knee technique. Many characters have to do a different move or act at a different time in order to deal with each of those situations. Against new players, I can create what looks like an inescapable lockdown, but really it’s a mixup that gives the opponent several chances to get out. It’s all an illusion.

I tested this trap against all 17 characters and every single one can get out. Ken can do a medium dragon punch (invulnerable on the way up) to ignore the entire situation. Zangief can use his green hand. Bison can just jump strong. Everyone can do something. Also remember that if these air fireballs hit, they deal only a couple pixels of damage. If they hit as Akuma lands, he can attempt to go into a damaging combo, but due to the way the game intentionally slows down when fireballs hit, this combo will fail about 50% of the time no matter how good you are.

The air fireball was a hit with playtesters because it’s so fun and feels so powerful, yet is actually beatable in many ways.

Raging Demon

Somewhere in the middle of development, we discovered that it was possible to make the Raging Demon super a guaranteed throw in many situations, such after a jump roundhouse. By adding some startup time (9 frames, same as CvS2), we thought we fixed this. Toward the end of development, we realized that we really didn’t and the Raging Demon was still guaranteed in lots of ways, most dangerously after any blocked air fireball! This made it the most powerful thing in the entire game and we had to do something. Unfortunately, the technical limitations surrounding this are big because it’s very difficult to mess with things like throw timing in the circuitous assembly code.

The solution we were able to implement is not quite ideal, but it’s definitely workable. In general in the SF2 series, when you hold up on the joystick, your character does not leave the ground immediately. Instead, he goes into a “pre-jump” state that lasts 2 to 5 frames, depending on the character. You can be thrown during pre-jump frames. The only change we made is that pre-jump frames are now invulnerable to the Raging Demon specifically.

That means if you hold up and you aren’t locked into doing a move or recovering from a move, you will always be able to jump out of Raging Demon, even from close on reaction. This makes the move a little weaker than intended, but it’s a preferable situation to being the best move in the game. This means the best time to use the super is when the opponent has committed to doing a move, such as a fireball or sweep. To help you land it, the Raging Demon is completely invulnerable and unthrowable. Even though opponents can jump out on reaction, it’s still possible to land this super by baiting their attacks first. [Note: there is a bug in that code and you can only jump out 25% of the time if you were in blockstun.]

Conclusion

Akuma has a solid ground game with fireballs that stand up to Ryu’s, juggling special moves, an incredibly versatile air fireball, and a tricky super. He does take more damage than any other character, though. Even though a lot went right with him and I personally think he's one of the most fun characters in the game, he must be banned because of a few bugs. We didn't quite get our 17th character.

I really pushed for Street Fighter HD Remix to be as complete and thorough as possible. Lets go over all the goodies. (You can get the game here.)

1) Two games in one.

You get the gameplay of the classic Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo, just like the arcade, and the brand new sequel to that game, Street Fighter HD Remix, both in one package. (They are called Classic and Remixed in the menus.) That means you get the nostalgia of the old, awesome gameplay AND you get a new, rebalanced game guided by the wisdom that tournament pros have accumulated over the last 14 years.

The classic mode has identical gameplay to arcade ST. Note that there was lots of misinformation about this. The code we used was based on the Dreamcast version, but it also had software dipswitches to set all gameplay to exactly like the classic arcade version. Special thanks to tournament player NKI for meticulously listing every single difference so that we could perfectly match the arcade version.

That said, the Remixed version has many improvements.

2) HD graphics

Every single piece of art in the game is redrawn in 1080p HD. That includes backgrounds, characters, endings, menus, and—well—everything. Udon Comics drew most of it.

3) Remixed music

All the music in the entire game is new. Every stage, every ending, and the menus. It’s from the OCRemix community, so the fans really contributed here.

4) Widescreen mode

On an HDTV, you can play the game in its original 4:3 aspect ratio, or switch to widescreen mode to fill your screen during gameplay. Widescreen mode zooms in and has slightly different camera behavior, but has no affect whatsoever on gameplay.

5) Every combination of the features above

Whether you’re playing the Remixed or the Classic game, you can turn HD sprites on or off. If you turn them off, you’ll get the original game’s sprites scaled up in all their blocky glory. This has no impact on gameplay, it’s just visual. Regardless of whether you play in Classic/Remix and HD sprites on/off, you can also turn remixed music on/off. If you prefer the original game’s tunes, go for it, it’s up to to you. Finally, no matter which of any of those modes you’re in, you can play in widescreen mode or 4:3 mode. All of this stuff is independent so you can customize these options however you want.

Also note that when you play online, your opponent won’t even know what your choices are regarding HD sprites on/off, remixed music on/off or widescreen mode on/off. All three of those affect your experience only, and your opponent might have different settings for those options on his end.

6) Advanced networking

The art delays in this project gave us a chance to experiment with several different networking techniques and we chose the best. We went with a predictive/rollback system that has the advantage of reducing input delay. I know that sounds pretty jargon-filled, so in plain English, it makes the game feel responsive and usually look smooth even during lag. We were able to refine this from the feedback on our open beta test, and also from a few experimental things we tried in the patch to the open beta.

The final version of the game has another feature called “smoothing” that lets you turn the input delay up or down. We found that best results were generally when there’s a very small input delay of 2 frames, as that leads to smooth network play that it is still so responsive that it feels instant to most people. You can set this to suit your own tastes, but try the default setting (2 frames) first.

Note that the networking uses Tony Cannon's ggpo technique, and he consulted to ensure it was done correctly.

7) Double-blind character selection online

When you’re playing online, don’t you hate it when your opponent refuses to pick a character until the last possible moment because he’s trying to make you pick first? He wants to see who you pick so he can pick the best character to beat yours. In HD Remix, all online play has double-blind character selection. That means that you cannot see who your opponent picked or even where his character selection box is until both of you finish picking your characters. Now there’s no reason to stall on this screen, you might as well just pick your character right away.

8) 8-player tournaments

As you saw from the open beta test, you can create your own 8-player, single elimination tournaments. The results go in the leaderboards. Those results don’t contribute to any kind of actual rank (you get to choose who enters your tournaments so we can’t really make them ranked) but after the tournament is over, anyone can see the bracket to verify who won.

9) A new announcer

We got overwhelming feedback that people did NOT like the voice of the high-pitched announcer in the original game. He’s usually referred to as “Big Bird.” We replaced him with a more gruff sounding voice. While we were at it, I replaced Guile’s girly sounding “Sonic Boom” with the more manly version from Street Fighter 2: Hyper Fighting. Give this one some time, and you’ll realize that almost anything is better than Big Bird.

10) Revised endings

Udon revised and rewrote the story and text of the endings to make them consistent with the current canon. And of course they redrew the endings, too.

11) Original costume colors

The original game has 8 costume colors for each character, but these costumes do NOT include the original iconic colors from the first Street Fighter 2. So if you want to play Ryu wearing white or Ken wearing red, your only choice was to play the “old” versions of those characters by using a code. The old versions had slightly different (usually worse) gameplay. First of all, you no longer need a code to select the old characters in Classic mode, you choose between two different game logos: Super Turbo and Super SF2.

The cooler news here about the costume colors in the Remixed game though. You can’t play the old characters at all in that game, but of course you want to be able to pick those iconic colors. You can. Select your character with the jab button to get that character’s old-school costume. If you want the color that used to be on jab, hold any punch button for 2 seconds. That means in the Remixed game, you have access to 9 different costume colors in total.

12) The CPU difficulty

In the original game, the difficulty of the computer AI is ridiculously hard. It’s harder than in any other Street Fighter game ever. Beating the first opponent is hard and beating the third one is usually beyond hard. Well, it’s just as hard as ever if you pick Classic mode, but in Remixed mode, I fixed up the difficulty so that easy is actually easy, medium is actually medium, and so on. Try playing the HD Remix arcade mode (where you fight all the CPU opponents), then if you want to risk breaking your controller in frustration, switch to Classic arcade mode.

13) Hitbox display

In training mode, you can turn on a display of the game’s hitboxes to see what’s really going on under the hood. Blue boxes are where your character can be hit and red boxes are where you can hit the opponent. This is my gift to the hardcore community, so they can refine their strategies more than ever.

14) Game speed

The game speeds match the arcade version of the game, but this is confusing so bear with me. In SF HD Remix, speed 3 is the default and is intended for tournament play and online play. It’s the same speed as Japanese arcade speed 3, which is also known as US arcade speed 2. You don’t really have to understand what’s going on with all that, just play at the default speed 3 and be happy that it matches the arcade.

Furthermore, there is a speed 0 in there for the hardcore players. On all speeds except 0, the game uses its own system of dropping frames in order to increase speed (we didn’t touch this, the arcade version did it too). This does affect whether some combos are possible/impossible. Speed 0 is slow, but it will let combo masters and makers of combo videos take frame-dropping out of the equation when they are trying to figure out which crazy combos are possible.

15) Dipswitches

The Dreamcast version has several secret dipswitches for turning bug fixes on and off. We took the dipswitches that actually affect gameplay and put them in a menu for you to adjust, if you want. These only affect offline matches, so you can’t use them online. For example, they let you turn on or off the ability for Chun Li to “store” her super. Note that the default setting for many of these is for a given bug to be fixed in Remixed mode but still unfixed in Classic mode (have to stay true to the original!).

Here's a list of the dipswitches you can toggle:

Ability to throw an opponent who was dizzied by a throw

Ability to store Honda's super

Ability to store Honda's command throw

Ability to store Chun Li's super

When Bison does a headstomp that hits a rising opponent only a few pixels above ground level, he briefly pauses

Old Characters in Classic Mode can cancel the same normal moves into special moves as...Super/Super Turbo characters

Slowdown during hit-stun

Percentage chance that the first frame of Old Ryu's air hurricane kick is unblockable

Percentage chance that the first frame of Old Ken's air hurricane kick is unblockable

Percentage chance that the first frame of Akuma's air hurricane kick is unblockable

Percentage chance that the first frame of Blanka's horizontal ball is unblockable

Percentage chance that the first frame of Blanka's vertical ball is unblockable

Vega's super drains the meter when he...touches wall/grabs opponent

Ability for Sagat to perform a reversal Super

Can do Sagat’s super using a kick button during a 1 frame window

Dhalsim’s reversal super

Ken’s reversal super

Some moves, such as Chun Li’s throw, which normally require a forward/back input can be done with an up input.

16) The dipswitch “hat”

I didn’t want to have to worry about tournament situations where someone changes the dipswitches to their advantage without anyone realizing it. In SF HD Remix, if you change even one dipswitch, a blue dot with a chrome enclosure will appear at the top middle of the screen, above the KO box. It looks kind of like a hat for the KO icon. Anyway, if you see that, you immediately know that someone has changed the dipswitches. Dipswitches don't affect online play, so you don't have to worry about any tricks there.

17) Button config

You get the best button config screen we could think of. Both players can set their buttons at the same time. It’s NOT that horrible kind of button config where it lists the buttons, then you have to scroll through various functions for that button. That kind is bad because when it says Y Button, or whatever, you might not even know which button that is if you have an arcade joystick. Even if you know, it takes a moment to think about it and figure out what is what.

Our button config works like this. You don’t have to know what any buttons are called and you don’t have to care about the layout on your controller or joystick. You simply press the buttons on your controller in this order: jab, strong, fierce, short, forward, roundhouse. That’s it. You don’t even have to tap down in between: we do that for you automatically. Furthermore, after you press those 6 buttons, you’ll end up on something called “unassigned.” If you press the remaining two buttons on your controller, we’ll unassign those for you so they don’t do anything if you accidentally hit them. If you unassign those (so you did 8 presses total) then we’ll move the menu highlight to ACCEPT for you automatically. Also note that we even support mapping more than one button to a function if you want. If you want two fierce buttons, then go for it!

18) Competition. Street Fighter HD Remix is built on the solid foundation of a known-good competitive game and then made many balance improvements on top of that. The worst characters are better and the best characters are slightly worse. Many lopsided matchups are closer now. All of this was guided by and tested by top tournament players, including John Choi, Graham Wolfe, Jason Cole, and Tokido. It's more accessible to new players than what came before it, and it's also better tuned for experts.

Kick lariat can now be done with jab+short as well as original KKK command.

Punch lariat can now be done with strong+forward or fierce+roundhouse as well as original PPP command.

Buffs

Green hand has 4 frames better recovery.

Running Grab runs faster.

Kick lariat has invulnerable feet during Zangief's first rotation, but vulnerable feet after that.

Punch lariat's initial hitframe now extends down to the floor so it can hit Dhalsim's low fierce or sometimes Guile's low forward. As before, this hitbox is only active for 6 frames out of the entire lariat.

Hop move can only be done with towards + fierce. No longer possible with back+fierce, back+strong, or towards+strong.

Balrog

Small and medium headbutts travel slightly farther and are barely less safe.

Throw range decreased slightly.

First hit of throw does less damage.

Turn Punch can be performed by holding 2 punches or 2 kicks, rather than all 3

Super does a little less damage (around 50% rather than 60%).

Super input window is larger and is a fixed size, rather than random size.

Vega

Defensive backflip command changed to jab+short for small version; strong+forward OR fierce+roundhouse for double flip version (old commands of KKK and PPP still work)

Offensive flipkick can no longer be charged straight back (must be charged down/back).

Off-the-wall attack no longer knocks down

New Wall Dive Fake: After going off the wall (charge down, then up+k), you can press kick again to drop without attacking.

Sagat

Note: in Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo, there are two versions of Sagat called Old and New. Old was more powerful but had no super move. HD Remix Sagat is based on New Sagat, meaning he does have a super, he can tech throws, and he does have New Sagat's very good cross-up with jumping medium kick.

Control Motion Changes

Tiger knee is now f,d,df+k (dragon punch motion).

Balance Changes

Fireball recovery is better than New Sagat but worse than Old Sagat. Here are the startup and recovery times for the short, forward, and roundhouse fireballs:

Version

Startup&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp

Recovery (Short/Forward/Roundhouse)

ST Old Sagat

11

38/38/38

ST New Sagat

13

46/48/50

AE Sagat

11

46/46/46

HD Sagat

13

41/42/43

Tiger knee always knocks down and it juggles (but NOT into a super, except in combo videos)

Tiger knee damage and dizzy reduced because of new juggle property

Super has more range and always knocks down if it hits.

Super can be done as a reversal.

Stand strong can cancelled into special moves still, but second hit of stand short and second hit of stand forward cannot be cancelled into special moves.

Bison

Devil's reverse (charge down, up+punch) has 2 frames of invulnerability at startup, and several more frames where feet and midsection are invulnerable, allowing it to pass through fireballs.

Stand jab has better priority, can stop Honda's torpedo and Blanka's roll but is not any better as an anti-air attack.

New move: df+roundhouse is a fake slide that travels short distance and recovers faster than the real slide.

Jump straight up + strong now juggles the same as jump toward/away + strong.

Super input window is larger and is a fixed size, rather than random size.

Cammy

Control Motion Changes

Hooligan throw motion changed to qcf+p (remember to hold a direction, then press kick while close and in-air to get the actual throw).

Fei Long

Control Motion Changes

Rekka punch motion is a little more forgiving, so it's not as hard to get all 3 in the series.

Buffs

Short version of flying kicks have additional frames of partial invulnerability, allowing them to go through fireballs at the start.

Medium and roundhouse flame kicks always knock down and can juggle. Because of this, flying kicks (juggle) -> flame kick (juggle) is a new standard combo. The total juggle limit shared by flying kicks / flame kicks is 4 hits. After 4 juggle hits, it's still possible to juggle with a super.

Rekka Punches travel a little farther.

Super travels farther.

Nerfs

Flying kicks have lower priority on first hit, allowing them to be countered air-to-air a little more easily.

Flying kicks have 5 additional frames of recovery to prevent them from comboing into stand fierce, rekka x 3. Usually leaves Fei Long about neutral on block (time to flame kick!)

Short flame kick is no longer safe on block from point-blank range.

Fei Long's head is vulnerable during 4th and 5th hits of the super (and can't go through fireballs during that, but still can during first 3 hits).

Super meter gains slightly reduced on flame kick and flying kicks.

Misc

After the last hit of the super, it is not possible to juggle further. (You couldn't anyway in ST due to startup time on flying kicks, but new juggle properties on flame kicks would have allowed this.)

Dee Jay

Machine Gun Punch, much easier to get all the hits (charge down, up+punch, mash punches)

Machine Gun Punch destroys fireballs.

Machine Gun Punch does less dizzy and less damage than before.

Medium and Roundhouse Dread Kicks, 2nd hit sped up so that it almost always hits if the first hit connects.

Medium and Roundhouse Dread Kicks have a few frames of foot-invulnerability at startup (can hit sweeps).

Medium and Roundhouse Dread Kicks have reduced damage because of improved ability to combo.

Super input window is larger and is a fixed size, rather than random size.

T.Hawk

Control Motion Changes

Hawk dive command changed to jab+short OR strong+forward OR fierce+roundhouse while in air (old command PPP still works)

Special throw command easier: hcb,f+p OR hcf,b+p, and you can actually start in down/back or down/forward. (Original 360 command also still works.)

Super command easier: hcb,hcb,f+p OR hcf,hcf+p.

Buffs

Hawk dive's bounce changed so it ends with T.Hawk close to enemy and safe on block or hit.

Several of T.Hawk's normal moves are from Old T.Hawk, such as stand roundhouse, stand strong, and low roundhouse. All of these moves are better than New T.Hawk's versions (stand strong and stand roundhouse have better hitboxes, low roundhouse comes out much faster).

Fixed a bug where a stray hitbox on low strong could be hit from very far away.

Nerfs

Hawk dive does not knock down.

Special throw now has a whiff animation if you miss to prevent an inescapable throw loop.

Super throw bounces T.Hawk slightly farther away, but special throw still has same bounce as ST.

Buffs

Air fireball can now be done lower to the ground, allowing instant air fireball using "tiger knee" motion.

Nerfs

Akuma takes slightly more damage than other characters.

Akuma can now be dizzied.

Akuma's leg is no longer invulnerable during his ducking kicks.

Red fireballs have more startup.

Blue fireballs have more startup and recovery. Now same startup as Ryu's fireball and slightly better recovery than Ryu's. Akuma's jab/strong/fierce blue fireball recovery times are 40,40,40 compared to Ryu's 41,42,43, frames.

Fierce blue fireball only has the huge knockback effect from very close range.

Helicopter kick has much less invulnerability.

Air fireball has new downward angle and causes Akuma to hang in the air slightly when thrown.

Super travels slower and farther than the secret version of Akuma in Dreamcast. Also, it has additional startup frames and cannot grab opponents during their "pre-jump" frames.